Adaptive Management of Cultivated Land Use Zoning Based on Land Types Classification: A Case Study of Henan Province

Abstract

Cultivated land serves as an important resource to ensure national food security, and how to allocate cultivated land reasonably and sustainably is an urgent problem that needs to be solved at present. Therefore, identifying land cultivability from the basic attributes of land and carrying out adaptive management measures in different zones is an effective way. Taking Henan province as a case study area, we proposed a research scheme for the adaptive management of cultivated land use zoning based on land types. First, a three-level land types classification system at the provincial level was established from five aspects—climate, topography, geology, soil properties, and hydrological conditions—and then Henan was divided into 39 first-level units, 4358 second-level units, and 6446 third-level units. On this basis, the changes in the status of land use in Henan province from 2009 to 2018 were analyzed from the four aspects of cultivated land utilization, population, grain yield, and GDP. The amount of cultivated land decreased, while the economy grew, the population increased, and grain yield increased, indicating that it is urgent to pay attention to the problem of cultivated land, and it is necessary to identify the potential space of cultivated land and manage and protect it reasonably. Based on the land types, evaluation of cultivability was carried out, the results showed that the degree of cultivability from high to low presented a transitional spatial distribution state from the east and the south to the middle, the north, and the west. Then superimposing the status of land use, six types of protection and management zones were proposed, and management suggestions were adaptively analyzed. The ideas and methods proposed in this study can be adapted to manage and utilize cultivated land from the perspective of sustainable utilization, which is of great significance for ensuring food security.