Spatiotemporal evolution and driving mechanism of slope cultivated land in karst mountainous areas of Southwest China—A case study of Puding County, Guizhou Province

Abstract Slope‐cultivated land (SCL) is essential for food security and ecological protection in Southwest China's karst mountainous areas (KMA). Constructing a unified conceptual framework to study SCL's spatiotemporal evolution characteristics thoroughly and driving mechanisms can comprehensively reveal the development of regional human–land relations and sustainable land use. Therefore, this article first constructs a conceptual framework for the spatiotemporal evolution of SCL in the KMA of Southwest China and carries out a case study in Puding County, a typical karst mountainous area, based on high‐resolution remote sensing images from 2004 to 2020 and the digital elevation model (DEM), to analyze the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of SCL in different topographic gradients and introduce the Geodetector further to explore the driving factors of SCL evolution. The results show that the SCL is evolving toward fragmentation, driven by socio‐economic factors. The active policy of the state encourages to abandon steep SCL with poor productivity in the KMA, and the abandonment of SCL in high altitude steep slope areas into woodland and grassland brings remarkable ecological benefits, while the evolution of SCL in low altitude gentle slope areas toward economic fruit forest generates significant obvious ecological‐economic win‐win benefits. The evolution of SCL in southwestern karst mountains has promoted regional ecological restoration and made an important contribution to the greening of the world by reducing land degradation (karstic rocky desertification, KRD). The present research results can provide ideas for the utilization, functional transformation, and ecologically sustainable development of similar mountainous SCL.