Spatiotemporal Changes of Cultivated Land System Health Based on PSR-VOR Model—A Case Study of the Two Lake Plains, China

Abstract

Cultivated land resources are the material basis of sustainable agricultural development. Climate change, food security, land pollution, and other issues highlight the value of sustainable agricultural development, and the health of the cultivated land system has attracted much attention. By constructing “PSR-VOR” cultivated land system health evaluation framework under the 5 km grid scale and using GIS spatial analysis and mathematical statistics to comprehensively evaluate the health status of the cultivated land system in the two lake plains from 2000 to 2019. The major results have shown that: (1) Over the past 20 years, both the highest and average values of the health index of the cultivated land system have gone down, and the health status of the cultivated land system has changed and gotten worse over time. (2) The health status in the two lake plains has been generally good, mainly in Class I and Class II areas. However, the area of cultivated land with general and poor health status has increased rapidly. On the whole, the health level presents the characteristic of gradually decreasing from the northeast to the southwest and southeast. (3) During the study period, the global Moran’s I value of the cultivated land system health index in the two lake plains increased from 0.686 to 0.729, with significant spatial positive autocorrelation, and the spatial heterogeneity of the cultivated land system health index gradually increased. As shown by the spatial distribution characteristics of high in the north, low in the south, and decreasing from the middle to the outside, the distribution of the high-value cluster area and the low-value cluster area of the cultivated land system health index in the two lake plains has not changed significantly over the past 20 years. (4) The two lake plains are divided into five areas: a moderate optimization area, a collaborative optimization area, a potential improvement area, a key improvement area, and a priority improvement area. The urgency of regulating the health status from the moderate optimization area to the priority improvement area has gradually increased, and the differentiated utilization and management of cultivated land resources need to be carried out according to local conditions.