A non-grain production on cropland spatiotemporal change detection
method based on Landsat time-series data
Abstract
Global food security is being threatened by the reduction of
high-quality cropland, extreme weather events, and the uncertainty of
food supply chains. The globalization of agricultural trade has elevated
the diversification of non-grain production (NGP) on cultivated land to
a prominent strategy for poverty alleviation in numerous developing
nations. Its rapid expansion has engendered a multitude of deleterious
consequences on both food security and ecological stability. NGP in
China is becoming very common in the process of rapid urbanization,
threatening the national food security. To better understand the causal
mechanisms and enable governments to balance food security and rural
development, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the
spatiotemporal dynamics of NGP using remote sensing. Yet knowledge gaps
remain concerning how to use remote sensing to track human-dominated or
-induced long-term cultivated land changes. Our study proposed a method
for detecting the spatiotemporal evolution of NGP based on Landsat time
series data under Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. This approach was
proposed by (1) obtaining the union of cultivated lands from multiple
landcover products to minimize the cultivated land omission, (2)
constructing multi-index dynamic trend rules for 3 representative types
of NGP and obtaining results at the pixel level, while adopting the
continuous change detection and classification (CCDC) algorithm to
Landsat time series (1986~2022) to determine when the
most recent change occurred, (3) minimizing the noise by object-oriented
(OO) Land Use–Land Cover (LULC) classification and mode filter
approaches, (4) mapping the spatiotemporal distribution of NGP. The
proposed methodology was tested in Jiashan, located in Zhejiang province
(eastern China), where NGP is widespread. We achieved high overall
accuracy of 95.67% for NGP type detection and an overall accuracy of
85.26% for change detection of time. The results indicated a continued
increasing pattern of NGP in Jiashan from 1986-2022, with the cumulative
percentage of NGP increased from 0.02% to 20.69%. This study
highlights the utilization of time-series data to document essential NGP
information for evaluating food security in China and the method is
well-suited for large-scale mapping due to its automatic manner.