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The decline and aging of the rural population in China has been an increasingly conspicuous problem in the past few decades and has been one of the fundamental drivers of cultivated land abandonment and loss. However, although they have endured similar rural demographic changes, some regions have experienced cultivated land expansion and the farming-pastoral ecotone is a typical one. Using Taibus as a case, this study aims to reveal the phenomenon of cultivated land expansion in the context of rural population decline and explore its underlying mechanism by addressing the role of cultivated land protection and land transfer policies. This study will also reveal the possible negative impacts and risks of cultivated land expansion. We found that 64.3% of the rural population in Taibus have migrated to other regions in 2020; however, cultivated land has increased by more than 10% in the past five years. Land transfer policies have helped to solve the agricultural labor shortage problem and increase household income, which encouraged the reclamation activities by rural households. However, under China’s land protection system, the central and the local governments have not enough incentives to prevent these reclamation activities. Cultivated land expansion in the farming-pastoral ecotone may lead to a series of negative impacts or risks, especially the overuse of groundwater resources and land desertification. Thus, we suggest that governments pay more attention to the phenomenon of cultivated land expansion and re-assess the cultivated land use policies in the farming-pastoral ecotone and other regions with similar contexts.

Rural Population Decline, Cultivated Land Expansion, and the Role of Land Transfers in the Farming-Pastoral Ecotone: A Case Study of Taibus, China