Reconstruction of cropland change over the past 300 years in the Jing-Jin-Ji area, China

Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) has strongly influenced the global and regional climate and environmental change, especially over the last three centuries. Accurate reconstruction of historical LUCC is a key step for assessing the impact of LUCC on global environmental change. To fill in the gap of regional historical cropland reconstruction in North China and achieve a better understanding of the historical cropland change process, in this paper we reconstruct cropland change at the county level over the past 300 years in the Jing-Jin-Ji (Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei) area, China. The reconstruction is based on sources including gazetteers, statistics and survey documents, and the methods are composed of data calibration, data interpolation and correlation analysis of data. The results show that the cropland change in the Jing-Jin-Ji area fluctuated, which can be classified into five stages: rapid increase in 1677–1755 and 1916–1950, slight growth in 1755–1884, gentle decline in 1884–1916 and rapid decrease after 1950. Two peak values appeared in 1884 and 1950. The spatial distribution of cropland in the Jing-Jin-Ji area kept a steady expansion and the majority of cropland concentrated on the plain before 1911. After this, the spatial distribution of cropland became more even and there was a rapid increase in the eastern coastal region and the northern hilly region. After 1985, the Jing-Jin-Ji area has experienced rapid urbanization and cultivation ratios in most counties declined, especially in Beijing municipality. Our dataset of the cropland area at the county level can contribute to improving the precision of the global and national land-use and land-cover datasets.