Cultivated land multifunctionality in undeveloped peri-urban agriculture areas in China: Implications for sustainable land management

The spatial planning and sustainable management of peri-urban cultivated land are key aspects of national development in many countries because of the continuing expansion of urban areas and deterioration of agro-ecosystem services. Detailed geo-informational investigation of cultivated land multifunctionality and the spatial interactions and dependencies of these multiple functions is required to inform the currently weak theoretical framework of multifunctionality at the peri-urban scale. Accordingly, the objective of this study was to construct a comprehensive methodology to identify and evaluate cultivated land multifunctionality in a spatial context. Geochemical data were used to measure cultivated land multifunctionality. We evaluated two main functions—the productive function and the ecological function—of an undeveloped peri-urban agriculture (PUA) area in the northern fringe of Changchun City in the black-soil region of northeastern China. For the ecological utilization of PUA areas, tradeoff and synergy analyses of cultivated land multifunctionality and coordinated development under complex land-use patterns were measured using a bivariate local Moran's I method. Results reveal considerable spatial heterogeneity in the two functions, with hotspots or coldspots being found in the PUA area. The productive function presents a less pronounced decreasing trend along the rural-to-urban gradient compared with the ecological function. Tradeoffs and synergies between the productive function and the ecological function occur mainly in the northern (more rural) part of the PUA area, where the spatial spillover effect of urbanization is relatively low. Cultivated land functions are strongly affected by urbanization-induced land-use types, and the coordinated areas of the productive function are generally consistent with those of the ecological function. According to these results, we delineate nine zones of multifunctionality in the studied PUA area. Given the importance of harmonizing cultivated land multifunctionality to manage limited land resources in a sustainable way, application of the GIS- and geochemistry-based multifunctionality evaluation scheme proposed in this study should be used to guide peri-urban spatial planning and land-use management and inform the policy arena concerning the transition of land use in urban peripheries.