Changes in crop type distribution in Zhangye City of the Heihe River Basin, China

•We classified the crop type distribution in 2007 and 2012 in Zhangye of Heihe.•The sowing area of corn and rapeseed increased while wheat and barley decreased.•Spatial-temporal unevenness of irrigation water led to crop spatial differentiation.•Crop type changes lead to the fragmentation and diversity of cultivated land.•The modeling of future crop transition potentials was performed.

With rapid economic development in China, crops have undergone remarkable changes in both their type and spatial pattern. Timely and accurate information of crop type distribution will help government and agricultural producers quickly understand regional agricultural production conditions to better facilitate appropriate adjustments in planting patterns and policies. Another benefit of acquiring such knowledge of crops is that it should enhance regional agricultural competitiveness, optimize resource allocations, and further guarantee national food security. Towards this end, and using the Zhangye City in the Heihe River Basin as a study area, the present research elaborated upon a methodology to classify crop type distribution based on multi-temporal Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (TM/ETM+) images. Using this methodology we achieved the spatial distributions of crop types in Zhangye City in 2007 and 2012, and analyzed changes in their distributions over this period. In addition, some landscape indices were calculated to clarify the landscape pattern of crops. The crop conversion potentials in 2017 were modeled using four conversion sub-models of the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network. Generally, the overall accuracy of crop classification in Zhangye was high, at 89.38%. From 2007 to 2012, the cultivated land area in Zhangye increased from 463.81 × 103 ha to 493.89 × 103 ha. The sowing area of corn and oilseed rape increased by 39.21 × 103 ha and 5.99 × 103 ha, respectively, while for wheat and barley the sowing area decreased by 3.61 × 103 ha and 9.14 × 103 ha, respectively. Considering other crop types as a group, their sowing area decreased by only 2.37 × 103 ha. The increase in corn sowing area mainly came from the conversion of other crops to corn, which accounted for 43.09% of its total sowing area in 2012. Furthermore, corn and oilseed rape showed a tendency of intensive sowing, whereas for wheat and barley the tendency was towards scattered sowing. For the future, corn has high conversion potential in Linze and Gaotai counties of Zhangye, while wheat, barley and oilseed rape have high conversion potentials in Minle and Shandan counties.