Study on spatial-temporal evolution and stimulation of agricultural marginal land

Marginalization of farm land is to be considered as a set of nature-social process rather than as a single social process, whereby the process becomes meaningful through myriad social practices. Although marginal land concept and assessment were widely discussed, an effective and quantitative assessment of marginal land for land use planning and management is limited. Marginal analysis has been widely applied to analyze agricultural land use, not in the least because of the conceptual parallels between social and economic analysis. For instance, similar to individuals in the research of LUCC, marginal land obtains centrality and power based on relative positions in the process of agriculture land use. On the one hand, marginal analysis avoids the reification of marginal land because it allows a direct focus on the agents connecting different facts at different levels. On the other hand, marginal analysis may also help us to address the 'macro-micro problem', by examining how the observed land use system patterns can be linked with spatial-temporal dynamics at local scales. The study aims to explore a new approach to quantitatively identifying marginal lands for various available land resources and providing technical supports of land use planning of food production as well as environmental management.