FOOD SUSTAINABILITY IN CHINA
Food productivity change under the rapid urbanization and rural development process in China: a geospatial perspective using remote sensing big data
Researchers
Jinzhu Wang Brett Bryan Michalis Hadjikakou
Urbanisation and agriculture in China (Source: The Guardian, AFP/Getty images)
Summary
Currently more than 50% of the global population lives in cities and urban areas and this share is continuing to increase. As the largest developing country, China has been given special attention to its food provision ability. It is reported that a total of 6.17 × 104 km2 of croplands has been lost between 1980s and 2010 in China. The accumulation of remote sensing data volumes along with the increasing number of satellites has changed the traditional way of analyzing remote sensing images, over five million Landsat images have been acquired and archived via several Landsat missions over 40+ years. With that huge data, this project will analyse the spatio-temporal relationship between urbanization/rural-development and crop production at the large scale using big data remote sensing time series and cloud-computing approaches. The objectives of the project are to 1) develop a time-series based machine learning approach to extract the footprint of urban/rural settlement and distinguish crop species (wheat, maize, rice, etc.), 2) make the extracted data land use/cover to reflect the crop production and planting system in China, and 3) explore how administrative level, population size and growth rate, and geographical conditions affect cropland production during the urbanization process.