Analysis of critical land degradation and development processes and their driving mechanism in the Heihe River Basin.

In arid regions, land development and degradation (LDD) is sustained by the undesirable land development, human production and living, and climate change. Therefore, the understanding of LDD processes and their driving mechanism in the arid or semi-arid regions is significant to guarantee the sustainable development of ecological environment. This study explored the critical LDD processes in the Heihe River Basin (HRB) during 1990-2010 with the spatio-temporal evaluation of critical land use dynamics and its land quality changing trends.

Ecological environment assessment based on land use simulation: A case study in the Heihe River Basin.

Ecological environment assessment can not only provide significant references for effective solutions to regional ecological problems, but also promote the benign interaction of socio-economic-ecological development. This study selected the Heihe River Basin (HRB) as the typical area to comprehensively evaluate the ecological environment from 2010 to 2030 based on the dynamics of land system (DLS) model, which is coupled with the biological abundance index (BAI), vegetation coverage index (VCI), water density index (WDI), land degradation index (LDI), and eco-environment quality index (EQI). The results indicate that the BAI and VCI will be high in the south and east, low in the north and west in general.

[Impacts of cultivated land conversion on cultivated land productivity in China: prediction and analysis].

This paper simulated the spatial patterns of cultivated land in China under the future scenario by using the Dynamics of Land System (DLS) model, and then estimated the cultivated land productivity at the grid pixel dimensions based on the Estimation System of Land Production (ESLP). In addition, the spatial patterns of cultivated land productivity in each of China agro-ecological zones were analyzed. On this basis, this paper predicted the impacts of cultivated land conversion on the cultivated land production in China in 2000-2020, and identified the major affecting factors on the cultivated land production.