The impacts of cropland balance policy on habitat quality in China: A multiscale administrative perspective

Cropland protection policies are implemented to guarantee food security, especially the cropland balance policy in China. Although these policies alleviate the quantitative loss of cropland, they cause a serious decline in habitat quality and reduce biodiversity. With the reform trial of China's cropland balance policy from the within-province scale to the cross-provincial scale, the evaluation of habitat quality for obtaining cropland balance at different administrative scales is necessary to help seek sustainable strategies of cropland protection. Thus, taking Chinese mainland as the study area, this research assessed the different impacts of the cropland balance policy on habitat quality during 2000-2015 and 2015-2030 at national, provincial, municipal and county scales on the basis of the LAND System Cellular Automata model for Potential Effects (LANDSCAPE) and the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs model (InVEST). The results revealed that (1) the loss of habitat quality by compensated cropland was 4.02 times that of the loss by occupied cropland in 2000-2015. Compared with occupied cropland, compensated cropland dominated the impacts of cropland change on habitat quality. (2) For both cropland quantity balance and cropland quality balance, habitat quality was slightly lost the most on the national scale in 2030. In detail, the greatest loss of habitat quality mostly occurred in areas where the ecological environment is already vulnerable at the national scale, whereas habitat quality was relatively less in these areas at the provincial, municipal and county scales. (3) Under the same administrative scales, habitat quality was lost more in cropland quality balance scenarios than in cropland quantity balance scenarios. The loss of habitat quality caused by cropland quality balance at national, provincial, municipal and county scales was 1.25, 1.05, 0.90 and 1.37 times higher than that by cropland quantity balance, respectively. The research highlights that considering the differentiated loss of habitat quality caused by cropland protection is quite important when implementing the cropland balance policy and land use planning.