Large-Scale Detection of the Tableland Areas and Erosion-Vulnerable Hotspots on the Chinese Loess Plateau

Tableland areas, featured by flat and broad landforms, provide precious land resources for agricultural production and human settlements over the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). However, severe gully erosion triggered by extreme rainfall and intense human activities makes tableland areas shrink continuously. Preventing the loss of tableland areas is of real urgency, in which generating its accurate distribution map is the critical prerequisite. However, a plateau-scale inventory of tableland areas is still lacking across the Loess Plateau. This study proposed a large-scale approach for tableland area mapping. The Sentinel-2 imagery was used for the initial delineation based on object-based image analysis and random forest model. Subsequently, the drainage networks extracted from AW3D30 DEM were applied for correcting commission and omission errors based on the law that rivers and streams rarely appear on the tableland areas. The automatic mapping approach performs well, with the overall accuracies over 90% in all four investigated subregions. After the strict quality control by manual inspection, a high-quality inventory of tableland areas at 10 m resolution was generated, demonstrating that the tableland areas occupied 9507.31 km(2) across the CLP. Cultivated land is the dominant land-use type on the tableland areas, yet multi-temporal observations indicated that it has decreased by approximately 500 km(2) during the year of 2000 to 2020. In contrast, forest and artificial surfaces increased by 57.53% and 73.10%, respectively. Additionally, we detected 455 vulnerable hotspots of the tableland with a width of less than 300 m. Particular attention should be paid to these areas to prevent the potential split of a large tableland, accompanied by damage on roads and buildings. This plateau-scale tableland inventory and erosion-vulnerable hotspots are expected to support the environmental protection policymaking for sustainable development in the CLP region severely threatened by soil erosion and land degradation.