Driving factors of cultivated land use change in city and countryside integration process and region comparisons

Abstract: Cultivated land use change has close relations with the economic development. Clarifying driving factors of cultivated land resource change of different economic developing stages is beneficial to buffering the contradiction between cultivated land protection and economic developments. First, it analyzes driving factors of cultivated land use change in the city and countryside integration process, selects 14 indexes to form the driving force index system of cultivated land change from five aspects of population and urbanization level, economic developing level, economic structure situation, citizen life level, investment and external level, collects statistics data of social economic developments of 30 cities of Jiangsu and Anhui Provinces of 2008, applies factor analysis method to extract main driving factors influencing cultivated land resource change, calculates factor scores and inspects its functional mechanism of cultivated land resource change; Besides, it conducts clustering analysis on these cities, explores regional differences of cultivated land change of driving characteristics of Jiangsu and Anhui Provinces. Research results show that the driving force of cultivated land use change can be attributed to economic developing, population and agriculture and system and policy factors, as the "N style" change of cultivated area brought by economic developments; population and agriculture factor and cultivated land number have highly positive linear relations and their correlation coefficient reaches 0.979; political factors adjust protection force of cultivated lands at opportune moments. According to cultivated land use change driving factors, cities of Jiangsu and Anhui Provinces can be divided into five types, which are economic strong driving type, coordinated driving type, agricultural weak developing type, agricultural strong developing type and economic weak driving type. Classified types are not only influenced by the economic developing stages, but also by the conditions of cities. By conclusion, it finds that industrial high-level cities are mainly driven by economic developments and structural adjustments; in the industrial preliminary stage, civil population and agricultural factors buffer the loss of cultivated lands; industrial cities of medium level are more complicated. For factoring differences of economic structure, resource gifting condition and city functional positioning, the driving force of cultivated land use change appears differentiation. Research conclusions help establishing and executing government cultivated land protective measures and providing scientific reference evidences. Each city should make reasonable decisions, transfer economic increasing patterns, keep in the most strict cultivated land protective systems, treasure, use properly and intensify economically lands and improve land productive efficiencies.