Optimizing cropland expansion for minimizing ecosystem service loss in China

Abstract

Global population growth and rising standards of living are the driving factors for the cropland expansion to meet increasing demands. However, there is no clear assessment of the specific losses on ecosystem services caused by China’s expansion of cropland to ensure food security at the cost of losing ecological land such as forests and grasslands. This study employed the ArcGIS platform and integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST) model to explore the cropland expansion in China from 2000 to 2020 and its impact on ecosystem services, so as to predict the priority areas of future cropland expansion in different scenarios. The results indicated that in the past 20 years, the total area of cropland expansion in China was 17.04 million hm² with 70.79 % conversion from forests and grasslands. Cropland expansion has contributed to an overall improvement in the food supply services with the Northern Arid and Semi-Arid Region exhibiting an increase of 18.76 × 10⁶ tons, while concurrently leading to a decline in habitat quality services. The priority areas for future cropland expansion without ecological loss were found to be 1.42 million hm², which only account for 9.44 % of the total reclaimable land. To minimize the loss of ecosystem services, there is a need to adjust the cropland replenishment policies and provide an operational solution for global food security and ecological protection.

Keywords

Cropland expansion / Ecosystem services / InVEST model / Spatial trade-offs / China

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Siyan Zeng: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Junna Liu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis. Jing Ma: Writing - review & editing. Yongjun Yang: Writing - review & editing. Gang-Jun Liu: Writing - review & editing. Fu Chen: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Supervision, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declares that there are no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that influenced the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52374170), the Major Special Projects of the Third Comprehensive Scientific Exploration in Xinjiang (Grant No. 2022xjkk1005), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. B230207001).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100299.

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