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Estimating Long-Term Changes in China’s Village Landscapes

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Abstract

Over the past 50 years, China’s ancient agricultural village landscapes have been transformed by unprecedented social, technological, and ecological changes. Although these dense anthropogenic mosaics of croplands, settlements, and other used lands cover more than 2 million square kilometers across China, the nature of these changes and their environmental impacts remain poorly understood because their spatial scale is generally too small to measure accurately using conventional land-change methods. Here, we investigate the regional consequences of fine-scale landscape changes across China’s village regions from 1945 to 2002 using high-resolution, field-validated ecological mapping of a regionally stratified sample of village landscapes at five sites across China, with uncertainties estimated using model-based resampling and Monte Carlo methods. From 1945 to 2002, built surface areas increased by about 7% (90% credible interval = 2–17%) across China’s village regions, an increase equivalent to about three times the total urban area of China in 2000. Although this striking result is explained by a near doubling of already large village populations and by lower housing density per capita in rural areas, two unexpected changes were also observed: a 9% net increase (−4% to +21%) in regional cover by closed canopy trees and an 11% net decline (−30% to +3%) in annual crops. These major regional changes were driven primarily by intensive fine-scale land-transformation processes including tree planting and regrowth around new buildings, cropland abandonment, and by the adoption of perennial crops and improved forestry practices. Moreover, the fragmentation, heterogeneity, and complexity of village landscapes increased over time. By coupling regional sampling and upscaling with observations in the field, this study revealed that fine-scale land-change processes in anthropogenic landscapes have the potential for globally significant environmental consequences that are not anticipated, measured, or explained by conventional coarser resolution approaches to global and regional change measurement or modeling.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant DEB-0075617 awarded to Erle C. Ellis in 2000. We are very grateful to Xin Ping Liu for research in Hunan, to Shi Ming Luo for supporting research in Guangdong, and to our local collaborators for field assistance across China. Peter Verburg developed our initial regionalization system. Thanks to Kevin Klingebiel, Kevin Sigwart, Jonathan Dandois, and Dominic Cilento for critical assistance in this project. Thanks to Jiyuan Liu for China land-cover data and to Yongzhong Tian for China population density data. Eric Lecoutre developed R code used in producing supplementary material—Appendix 5. Thanks to Michael Leonard and the National Archives and Records Administration for historical aerial photographs. SpaceImaging provided IKONOS imagery. Erle Ellis thanks Steve Gliessman of the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Chris Field of the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institute of Washington at Stanford for graciously hosting his sabbatical. A final thanks to Greg Asner, Diann Prosser, Mutlu Ozdogan, and our anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. Kui Peng

    Present address: Metallurgical and Ecological Engineering School, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

  2. Hongqing Wang

    Present address: Institute of Coastal Ecology and Engineering, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana, 70504, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, Maryland, 21250, USA

    Erle Christopher Ellis & Hongqing Wang

  2. Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, Maryland, 21250, USA

    Nagaraj Neerchal & Yan Zhuang

  3. Institute of Geographic Sciences & Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Kui Peng & Hua Ouyang

  4. Institute of Tropical & Subtropical Ecology, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510642, China

    Hong Sheng Xiao

  5. Agronomy College, Sichuan Agricultural University, Yaan, Sichuan, 625014, China

    Shou Cheng Li

  6. Department of Agronomy & Agroecology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100094, China

    Jun Xi Wu & Xu Cheng

  7. Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210008, China

    Jia Guo Jiao & Lin Zhang Yang

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  1. Erle Christopher Ellis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erle Christopher Ellis.

Additional information

E. C. Ellis conceived and managed research, and wrote the article; K. Peng, H. S. Xiao, H. Wang, S. C. Li, J. X. Wu, and J. G. Jiao conducted research; H. Ouyang, X. Cheng, and L. Z. Yang managed research; N. Neerchal and Y. Zhuang contributed methods and models.

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Ellis, E.C., Neerchal, N., Peng, K. et al. Estimating Long-Term Changes in China’s Village Landscapes. Ecosystems 12, 279–297 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-008-9222-4

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