Modeling the Drivers of Agricultural Land Conversion Response to China's Rapidly Rural Urbanization: Integrating Remote Sensing with Socio-Economic Data

Agricultural land has changed remarkably response to the rapidly rural urbanization in China since the further market-oriented reform of early 1990s. Using accurate remote sensing images and socioeconomic data, this paper identified the temporal pattern of agricultural land conversion and estimated their driving forces during 1992-2010 in Yueqing City. Agricultural land change can be summarized to three trends: Firstly, the conversion between non-agricultural land and agricultural land was very remarkable, the non-agricultural land increased obviously from 1992 to 2010, in verse farmland decreased continuously; Secondly, the loss agricultural land mostly were the higher quality cropland. The expansion of settlements and industrial park was almost completely at the expense of fertilize farmland in flat area, but hillside and tideland were reclaimed for planting grain to keep the dynamic balance of total agricultural land amount. Thirdly, the changes of agricultural land distributed regularly and according to the distance to the No. 104 national highway. In addition, the stepwise regression analysis indicated that both the booming of rural private enterprises and increasing of population was main driving force of agricultural land conversions. According to the results, we discussed the negative impact of fertile farmland shrink and gave some feasible advices in the end.