Application of landscape pattern analysis in arable land based on right to rural land contractual management registration

Abstract: The outcome data of right to rural land contractual management registration is one of the basic sources of agricultural land resource element data sharing platform, and the foundation of rural collective property rights reform in China. How to expand the outcome data to the application of agricultural development is still being explored. In the study, the outcome data of right to rural land contractual management registration was applied to analyze the arable land landscape pattern. The study area was Zhengjia Town in Liaocheng, Shandong Province. The town was one of the experimental areas of right to rural land contractual management registration. Based on the vector data of registered arable land obtained from measurement in 2015, and with the Multi-spectral remote sensing data, the natural landscape and the tenure landscape in township scale were compared and analyzed in different administrative scales using the landscape indicators. 9 landscape indicators were selected including patch density (PD), total area(TA) (or class area (CA)), number of patches (NP), largest patch index(LPI), landscape shape index(LSI), perimeter-area fractal dimension (PAFRAC), aggregation index (AI), euclidean nearest neighbor distance mean (ENN_MN), and average area of farmer(AA). The indicators can reflect the relationship of arable land use and the human activities from fragmentation, spatial aggregation and land assignment. Respectively, village and township arable land tenure landscape pattern were compared. The results showed that, in township scale, the arable land area was about 60.44% of the total area. The extraction of arable land area was 5.38 km2 larger than the registered result. The results of NP and PD showed that tenure landscape was more fragmentary than natural landscape. LPI showed that the arable land was continuous in large pieces in natural landscape, but small pieces in tenure landscape. LIS and PAFRAC indicated that the patch shapes in tenure landscape were more complicated than the natural landscape. ENN_MN and AI showed that natural landscape was more concentrated. The results of indicators reflected that right to rural land contractual management registration affected the arable land landscape pattern, which make the natural landscape and the tenure landscape were different. In village scale, the fragmentation, spatial aggregation and land assignment of tenure landscape and natural landscape had the same feature with the township scale. The tenure landscape pattern originated right to rural land contractual management registration was analyzed further. NP and PD were positively correlated. Mostly AAs were between 0.13 and 0.62 hm2, but a few AAs were out of scope largely. CA, LPI, ENN_MN, LSI and PAFRAC indicated that arable lands were assigned differently for each village, but the cultivation seemed to be consistency. The whole landscape shows a high degree of aggregation, however, the fragmentation, patch contiguous and patch shapes of the arable land are complicated at different spatial scales. In general, the data of right to rural land contractual management registration can be used to analyze the arable land landscape pattern as tenure landscape at different spatial scales. Tenure landscape and natural landscape have difference features in an administration scale. The results can provide a reference for contracted land allocation, farmland circulation structure and farmland remediation in different levels of administration, which assist wisdom agricultural development.