Spatiotemporal Assessment and Obstacle Diagnosis of Cultivated Land Quality Under Rapid Urbanization: Evidence from Chengdu, China

Conventional static approaches to cultivated land quality (CLQ) assessment often fail to capture the rapid spatial restructuring of cultivated land in urbanizing regions. This study takes Chengdu, China, as the study area and employs multi-source and multi-indicator datasets from 2010, 2017, and 2023 to assess CLQ using an integrated AHP-CRITIC weighting approach, combined with obstacle degree and constraint factor analyses. The results show that the mean CLQ score increased from 0.520 in 2010 to 0.695 in 2023, reflecting the continuous improvement in stable cultivated land quality. Constraint factors also shifted from natural endowment limitations to engineering- and management-related disturbances: converted land was mainly constrained by climatic and topographic conditions, newly added land by soil moisture and fertility after land-use conversion, and stable land by compound soil-water and terrain constraints. These findings provide scientific evidence and practical references for high-standard farmland construction and refined cultivated land governance in rapidly urbanizing grain-producing regions.