Rural residential land expansion and its impacts on cultivated land in China between 1990 and 2020

Rapid urbanization and industrialization have largely promoted the transformation of urban and rural space. In recent years, rural residential land expansion (RRLE) has also become a significant problem for the progress of China’s rapid urbanization. The phenomenon of RRLE and its impact on cultivated land needs to be taken seriously. From a process perspective, this study aimed to explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of RRLE under conditions of rapid urbanization and reveal its impacts on cultivated land. We analyzed the spatial pattern of cultivated land occupied by rural residential land and discuss the distribution characteristics under different factors. Our results show that: (1) the changing trend in RRLE between 1990 and 2020 ran counter to that of rural population. The problem of “decreasing population vs. increasing rural residential land” in rural China is significant. The spatial distribution of RRLE was dense in the east of the country and sparse in the west. Landscape metrics indicated that rural settlements still show irregular development; (2) the impacts of RRLE on the cultivated land system were significant. In general, these impacts were greater than those of urban expansion, and showed significant regional differences; (3) the cultivated land occupied by rural residential land was distributed mainly in city suburbs and areas of low elevation and slope, and were closely related to the direction of traffic flow. Based on these findings, some suggestions for optimizing the interrelations between population and rural residential land are proposed.