Cultivated land system resilience in China’s major rice-producing areas: spatiotemporal patterns and zonal regulation strategies

Abstract

Cultivated land systems face convergent pressures from land-use change, farmland marginalization, and dietary upgrading, and thus understanding their resilience is essential for sustaining agricultural functions and food security. Focusing on China’s major rice-producing areas (MRPAs), we developed a spatially explicit resilience framework that integrates internal adaptive capacities and external socio-economic conditions, and examined the spatial and temporal patterns of cultivated land system resilience using three representative years (2000, 2010, and 2023). We quantified resilience, diagnosed dominant constraints via an obstacle model, and developed differentiated regulation pathways based on the identified constraints. Results show that: (1) overall resilience increased with fluctuations, with a growing role of socio-economic conditions alongside persistent environmental constraints. This improvement coincided with infrastructure development and policy interventions, although urbanization pressures may have constrained resilience in peri-urban areas. (2) resilience exhibited marked spatial differentiation. Large-scale agricultural regions maintained higher resilience, coinciding with favorable natural endowments and relatively well-developed infrastructure, whereas fragmented and highly urbanized areas remained more vulnerable amid intensified human–land conflicts. (3) dominant obstacles shifted from natural background constraints to socio-economic factors over time. Four regulation zones were identified: background-restricted low-resilience, external-stress resilience risk, resource-constrained lagging recovery, and market-sensitive hidden risk. These findings provide a diagnostic basis for differentiated management by tailoring strategies to region-specific resilience constraints.