Spatiotemporal Change Analysis and Prediction of the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR) Land Cover and the Relationship Analysis with Mountain Hazards

The study of land use/land cover (LULC) changes plays an important guiding role in regional ecological protection and sustainable development policy formulation. Especially, the simulation study of the future scenarios may provide a hypothetical prospect which could help to determine the rationality of current and future development policies. In order to support the ecological protection and high-quality development strategy of the Yellow River Basin proposed by the Chinese government, the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR) is taken as the research area. The multi-period land cover data are used to carry out the analysis of land cover changes. The MOLUSCE (Modules for Land Use Change Simulations) plugin of QGIS software is used to carry out a land cover simulation and prediction study for 2030 on a large regional scale. Finally, the land cover status in the mountainous areas of the GYRR is analyzed thoroughly. The results show a decrease in agricultural land and increase in forest land during the past 25 years from 1995 to 2020, and that this trend would continue to 2030. The landscape pattern index analysis indicates that the land cover in the GYRR has become more and more abundant, and the degree of fragmentation has become higher and higher, while landscape patches were more evenly distributed in the GYRR until 2020. On the other hand, the landscape pattern would tend to achieve a certain degree of stability in 2030. The decrease in farmland and the increase in forest land illustrate the efforts made by the GYRR residents and governments in improving the ecological environment under the policy of returning farmland to forests and grasslands. On the other hand, although the residential areas in the mountainous areas are far away from the mountain hazard historical points because of consideration during construction with the help of the development of disaster prevention and mitigation over the years, there could be problem of rapid and haphazard urbanization. It is worth mentioning here that the harmonious and sustainable development of people and land in the GYRR mountainous areas still requires a large amount of effort.