Analysis of Farmland Abandonment at Parcel Level: A Case Study in the Mountainous Area of China

Chongqing municipality, the main study area of this paper, is a mountainous city in Southwest China, where massive rural populations migrated to cities and towns in recent years. This study extracted abandoned farmland figure spots from farmland distribution maps of 2002 and 2011 on a 1:10,000 scale. Further, this research analyzed the spatial distribution characteristics of farmland abandonment and its influencing factors at the parcel level from 2002 to 2011. The main influencing factors of farmland abandonment include distance of a parcel to the closest settlement, difference between the parcel elevation and the average elevation of the whole village settlement, parcel slope, and parcel size. The former three factors are positively correlated with farmland abandonment rate, and parcel size is negatively correlated. That is to say that larger commuting distance, elevation difference, and parcel slope increase the abandonment probability; and a larger parcel size can reduce the risk of abandonment.