Influence mechanism and governance strategies of cultivated land degradation in Lower Liaohe Plain from the mutual feedback perspective of quality and ecology

Cultivated land degradation has seriously threatened to the national food security and sustainable land use. Among them, the sustainability of cultivated land can decrease or even completely lose, when it is subjected to the external disturbance. This temporal and spatial evolution can represent the cultivated land quality and ecological degradation. Significant mutual feedback between them can also impact the cultivated land degradation. It is crucial to clarify the mechanisms of cultivated land degradation and governance strategies, in order to ensure the national food security and sustainable utilization of cultivated land. Most existing studies have been focused on the evaluation and monitoring of cultivated land degradation. However, it is still lacking to consider the "comprehensive" interaction between the quality and ecological degradation of cultivated land. Furthermore, it is a high demand to clarify the influencing factors and mechanism of cultivated land degradation for the effective countermeasures. In this study, a novel system was constructed to measure the cultivated land degradation from the mutual feedback perspective of quality and ecology. Shenyang City in the typical Liaoning Plain area was also selected as the research area. The spatiotemporal characteristics, influence mechanisms and governance strategies of cultivated land degradation were explored using principal component analysis, objective weighting, exploratory regression, geographical weighted regression, quantile regression, and fuzzy data set comparison. The results show: 1) The proportion of cultivated land quality degradation was 35.31% in the study area, indicating a "strong east, weak west" spatiotemporal pattern; The proportion of cultivated land ecological degradation was 79.10%, with the spatiotemporal pattern of "strong north, weak south"; According to the quality and ecological mutual feedback, the proportion of cultivated land degradation was 37.80%, indicating a “strong north and south, weak middle” spatiotemporal pattern. 2) The temperature, vegetation coverage, urbanization, irrigation capacity and environmental pollution were the key natural conditions and socio-economic factors, leading to the degradation of cultivated land in the study area. The spatial heterogeneity was found in the effects of these factors on cultivated land degradation in different regions. There were the non-stationarity effects of development stages on the cultivated land degradation. Different structural configurations were formed to synergistically affect the cultivated land degradation. There were the regional, periodical, and structural influence mechanisms of cultivated land degradation. 3) According to the intensity of cultivated land degradation in the different regions, the different influencing factors and the action path of multi-factor combination, the graded and zonal protection of cultivated land was established to utilize and control the multi-factor concurrent collaborative governance and security path. The impact mechanism of cultivates land degradation was obtained from the perspective of quality and ecological mutual requirements. The finding can provide the policy reference for the accurate, efficient and collaborative management of degraded cultivated land. The synchronous quality and ecological environment of cultivated land can be expected to resist external adverse factors.