Cultivated land health-productivity comprehensive evaluation and its pilot evaluation in China

Abstract: Evaluation of the healthy productivity of cultivated land in China, analysis of key problems of different regions that endangers cultivated land health is of great significance to explore sustainable cultivated land utilization path and safeguard national food security and ecological security. The evaluation of cultivated land healthy productivity should be executed base on integration of existing evaluation indicators system and evaluation method achievements and clarification of key factor states and driving processes that affecting cultivated land health from the perspective of cultivated land components. And interaction characteristics between cultivated land health and cultivated land productivity should be analyzed by coupling them with each other. In this paper, we selected 65 counties (cities) nationwide as research regions with considering the difference of climate conditions in different regions of China, and used 5 categories of indicators including topographic characteristics, soil properties, tillage conditions, environmental conditions and biological characteristics to present the cultivated land health status. And on that basis, we defined critical health threshold and critical sub-health threshold of different indicators by analyzing counties' indicator standard deviation convergence characteristics and scoring rules. We divided all pilot counties into three statuses: Health, sub-health and unhealth, and analyzed spatial distribution features of counties with different health status. Furthermore, regional climate conditions indicator, cultivated land natural conditions indicator and tillage technique level indicator had been synthetically integrated to evaluate the productivity of cultivated land, and regional cultivated land health-productivity interaction characteristic had been analyzed. Experimental result showed that counties whose cultivated land in sub-healthy or unhealthy status expressed significant regional features, and the key factors of limiting cultivated land health were different among pilot counties. On the one hand, the sub-health status cases caused by inferior farming conditions indicator were more common (accounting for nearly 40% of pilot counties) than other indicators, which was not only manifested by serious fragmentation of cultivated land and imperfect farmland infrastructure, but also reflected the urgent requirement for promoting high-standard farmland construction. On the other hand, the form of biological characteristics was severe, indicating that under the interaction of climatic conditions, soil structure and tillage technology, the ability of cultivated land to guarantee the healthy growth of animals was facing degradation. Furthermore, through coupling analysis of cultivated land health and cultivated land productivity, we divided the cultivated land healthy productivity characteristics of pilot counties into six categories: "health-high productivity", "health-low productivity", "sub-health-high productivity", "sub-health-low productivity", "unhealth-high productivity" and "unhealth-low productivity", and respectively analyzed the regional farmland protection directions for each category. "Sub-health/unhealth-high productivity" type was widely distributed, which was the core region for implementation of "storing grain on land and storing grain in technology" strategy in China. Therefore, it is necessary to give consideration to the health and productivity of cultivated land in this region, and strengthen the research and practice on methods to improve the health of cultivated land. This study provides scientific basis for improving cultivated land healthy productivity and provides effective support for designing protection paths of cultivated land resources in different regions.