Study on Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors in Cultivated Land and Construction Land in Yunnan Province in the Past 20 Years Based on Remote Sensing Interpretation

With the continuous development of China’s economy and the acceleration of urbanization, the phenomenon of high-quality cultivated land being converted to construction land is becoming increasingly prominent. In mountainous provinces such as Yunnan, the contradiction between cultivated land protection and blind expansion of construction land is becoming increasingly obvious. Based on the characteristic region of the mountainous province of Yunnan, this paper integrates remote sensing image interpretation of land use/land cover data in three phases (i.e., 2000, 2010, and 2020) with GIS technology and econometric methods. Through the interpretation of remote sensing images from 3 phases of Yunnan Province, a detailed calculation was conducted on the per capita cultivated land area (CULA) and per capita construction land area (COLA) and their changes in 129 counties in the province over the past 20 years (2000~2020). The spatiotemporal evolution laws and spatial pattern characteristics of CULA and COLA were analyzed, and then, the influencing factors in the quantitative characteristics of cultivated land and construction land in the province were studied further by using spatial econometric models. This study finds that the total and per capita CULA in Yunnan Province have significantly decreased over the past 20 years, which poses a threat to the national food security to a certain extent. At the same time, the total amounts of COLA and the per capita COLA have significantly increased, leading to the phenomenon of blind expansion and rough utilization of construction land. Compared with international research results, Yunnan can learn many lessons about controlling the reduction in CULA and the rapid expansion of COLA, among which the most important thing is to choose suitable urban and industrial development paths and adopt effective intensive land utilization methods. The research results of this study can provide a basic reference for mountainous provinces to formulate reasonable measures for cultivated land protection, prevent the disorderly expansion of construction land, and promote the coordinated development of urban and rural areas.