Examining winter fallow farmland from space and geography: a case study in Guizhou, China

ABSTRACT

Winter fallow farmland is increasing dramatically in some regions in China. Our goal was three-fold: (1) to develop a consistent procedure to identify winter fallow farmland from satellite images; (2) to examine the driving factors of winter fallow farmland; and (3) to identify additional determinants affecting the spatial distribution of winter fallow farmland. We applied geographically weighted regression to examine the spatial interactions of these driving factors. High percentages of winter fallow farmland in the north-eastern region were largely attributed to elevation, income, farmland area, and slope. Geography had a strong impact on the occurrence of fallow farmland.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographically weighted regression
• NDVI
• SPOT
• image processing
• winter fallow farmland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [41421001]; National Science & Technology Pillar Program of China [2012BAI32B07]; GDAS' Special Project of Science and Technology Development [2017GDASCX-0101]; and the Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research Team Program [2016ZT06D336].