Identification, Mechanism and Countermeasures of Cropland Abandonment in Northeast Guangdong Province

Cropland serves as the most vital resource for agricultural production, while its security is primarily threatened by abandonment. Northeast Guangdong Province features a fragmented terrain and faces a significant issue of farmland abandonment. It is crucial to analyze the phenomenon of cropland abandonment to safeguard food security. However, due to limitations in data sources and attribution methods, previous studies struggled to comprehensively characterize the driving mechanisms of abandoned land. Using data from Sentinel time series remote-sensing images, we employed the land use change trajectory method to map cropland abandonment in Jiaoling County from 2019 to 2023. Furthermore, we proposed a novel analytical framework to quantify the influence pathways and interaction effects driving cropland abandonment. The results indicate that: (1) The overall accuracy of the abandoned land extraction is 79.6%. During the study period, the abandonment rate in Jiaoling County showed a trend of a “gradual rise followed by a sharp decline”, and the abandoned area reached its maximum in 2021. The abandonment phenomenon in the southeastern rural areas was serious and stubborn. (2) The slope has the greatest explanatory power for abandonment, followed by the total cultivated area, aggregation index of cropland, and distance to road. Each driving factor has a threshold effect. (3) Topography, location, and agriculture driving factors directly or indirectly affect the abandonment rate, with direct influences of 0.247, 0.255, and −0.256, respectively. The research findings offer valuable scientific guidance for managing abandoned land and deepen our understanding of its formation mechanisms.