Jinzhu Wang

Pathways for land-use, agricultural production, and food security in the North China Plain from 2020 to 2100 

Summary:

More than half a billion people (302 million to 884 million) emerged in urban areas in China in just 30 years (1990 to 2019), and food security bears the brunt of this rapid process because half of the newly developed urban areas come from farmland. My Ph.D. project successfully maps the historical urban development of China with consistently high overall accuracy (>94%) from 1990 to 2019, projects the future urban extents using a deep learning model, and assesses the food security under various urbanization paths. The urban mapping with innovated temporal-feature-based method significantly increases the accuracy by 8%, the urban projection with deep learning is a significant addition to conventional simulation models, and the assessment of urbanization to food security identifies a potential food crisis in the 2040s with a precise assessment to climate change, urbanization, crop productivity improvement, and farmland reclamation. The method provides a complete approach to assess urbanization and food security from data curation and modeling, the result offers strategic references for regulating urban development and maintaining food security in the research area and beyond.