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Assessment of the cultivated land quality in the black soil region of Northeast China based on the field scale

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Abstract

In some developing countries, particularly China, a significant number of individual farmers manage small field scale of cultivated land. However, the existing research on cultivated land quality assessment mainly focuses on large-scale regions, establishing comprehensive index systems from a macro perspective, while lacking evaluations customized to individual farmers, who constitute a crucial component in agricultural production, and a demand-driven field-scale assessment of cultivated land quality. Therefore, we developed a field-scale index system that meets the needs of individual farmers in the black soil region of Northeast China. Additionally, we proposed a machine learning model for field-scale cultivated land quality assessment. The experimental results showed that our model achieved an \({R}^{2}\) value of 0.9660 and an \(RMSE\) of \(1.94\times {10}^{-2}\) under fourfold cross-validation, which represents an improvement of 5.19% and a reduction of 1.13%, respectively, relative to the XGBoost model. Ultimately, we conducted obstacle factor diagnosis, aiming to assist individual farmers in identifying the existing issues in their cultivated land fields. This study not only provides guidance to individual farmers but also addresses the research gap in cultivated land quality assessment by offering an individual farmer demand-driven index system for field-scale studies.

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The data published in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to the policy of the research project.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Agricultural Bureau of Gannan County for its valuable assistance in data collection.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFD1500104-2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, School of Electrical and Information, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, 150030, China

    Hongmin Sun, Zhao Yang, Xiaoming Li, Meng Gao, Xifan Meng & Linqi Zhu

  2. Department of Land Resources Management, School of Public Administration and Law, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, 150030, China

    Yanhong Hang, Xue Lu & Yujie Yang

Authors
  1. Hongmin Sun
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  2. Zhao Yang
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  3. Xiaoming Li
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  8. Xifan Meng
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  9. Linqi Zhu
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Contributions

H. S.: conceptualization, formal analysis, supervision, and project administration. Z. Y.: study design, methodology, data curation, validation, and original draft preparation. X. L.: formal analysis, methodology, and original draft preparation. Y. H.: supervision and validation. M. G.: review and editing. X. L.: study design. Y. Y.: data curation. X. M.: validation. L. Z.: original draft preparation.

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Correspondence to Xiaoming Li.

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Sun, H., Yang, Z., Li, X. et al. Assessment of the cultivated land quality in the black soil region of Northeast China based on the field scale. Environ Monit Assess 195, 1508 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-12099-4

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