Cropland area in 2005, based on MODIS, was compared to the sum of area inventoried for harvest per geopolitical region.
Net cropland area distribution was 95 Mha during season 1, 117 Mha during season 2, and 84 Mha continuous.
Major impacts of climate change will be on rain-fed crops that account for nearly 60% of cropland area.
Second, over the past 50 years, and especially in LAC developing economies, cropland area has continued to expand (see Fig. 1).
Previous research into the global land use impacts of biofuels has assumed that cropland area could expand in most regions of the world.
In this analysis, we combine the number of cropland patches (NP) with the total cropland area (TA) for a more comprehensive characterization of cropland change in China.
LC has been implemented in China since the mid-1990s in an attempt to increase available cropland area, reduce fragmentation and promote agricultural production capacity.
It suggests that the cropland conservation policy in China effectively protected the total cropland area in overall, but the consequences in terms of fragmentation might be underestimated.
Then in 1978, as a result of introducing an integrated watershed management program, the area of forest and grassland increased to 16.98 hectare and 615.32hectare, respectively, and with decline of cropland area to 170 hectare.
For example, Searchinger et al. [2] provided the first peer-reviewed estimate for the ILUC (about 0.193 ha of new cropland area per 1,000 l of ethanol capacity).
Cropland area was expanded or contracted as necessary, using a global kernel density representing the combined density of cropland and distance of each grid-cell to the nearest cropland region.
