Case Study on Enhancing Cultivated Land Use Resilience Through Spatial Layout Optimization in Northern Guangdong, China

Cultivated land spatial layout optimization is of great significance for enhancing comprehensive agricultural productivity and safeguarding food security. However, existing studies primarily focus on production suitability as the optimization objective, while rarely incorporating improvements in cultivated land use resilience and stable use as explicit objectives, which may leave optimized layouts difficult to sustain. To fill this gap, this study takes Meizhou City as a case and conceptualizes cultivated land use resilience under non-grain conversion of the agricultural production structure as a key proxy for stable use. Based on 2019 data, a resistance–reconversion capacity assessment framework is developed, and a 2035-oriented cultivated land layout is generated under a transfer-in–transfer-out area-balance constraint by integrating XGBoost–PVI, the InVEST model, and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The optimized configuration is evaluated using a 2019–2024 observation window. The results show that, after optimization, the mean and minimum cultivated land use resilience increase by 1.72% and 15.16%, respectively, and the share of cultivated land in medium-to-high resilience classes rises by approximately 11.06%. Validation further indicates that parcels selected for transfer-out and transfer-in in the optimized scheme are more likely to undergo transfer-out and restoration in practice. Incorporating cultivated land use resilience into multi-objective layout optimization can simultaneously enhance stable-use potential and spatial integration efficiency, providing decision support for cultivated land layout optimization and sustainable use.