Tracking three decades of land use and land cover transformation trajectories in China's large river deltas

Abstract Large river deltas are characterized by complicated land use/land cover (LULC) dynamics driven by intertwined natural and anthropogenic processes. Understanding spatiotemporal LULC dynamics associated with multiple drivers can help mitigate the adverse ecological impacts resulting from human activities. This research tracked spatiotemporal LULC trajectories in relation to multiple natural and anthropogenic driving processes and explored their correlations within four large river deltas (the Liaohe River Delta [LRD], Yellow River Delta [YRD], Yangtze River Delta [YtRD], and Pearl River Delta [PRD]) in China from 1980 to 2010. The results showed that the coastal wetlands had undergone transformations with 39% in LRD, 85.1% in YRD, 96.5% in YtRD, and 100% in PRD, respectively. The LULC transformations were linked with six major driving processes (accretion, erosion, reclamation, restoration, succession, and regressive succession) and were impacted by complex coupled effects between natural and anthropogenic drivers. Reclamation‐related LULC transformation types dominated in the four river deltas and had greater spatiotemporal interactions than the other driving processes. Reclamation and restoration as well as accretion and erosion showed high positive correlations in all four river deltas, but other pairwise correlations of driving processes presented regional variations. This study presents an overview of the patterns and processes of complex multitemporal LULC dynamics and can be replicated elsewhere in areas where land reclamation activities are entangled with natural processes. A ‘scrolling’ development pattern with reasonable magnitudes of land reclamation for the river deltas is proposed as a spatial strategy to minimize the adverse ecological impacts of human activity.