Zoning farmland protection under spatial constraints by integrating remote sensing, GIS and artificial immune systems

Currently, with rapid expanding of urban area, the rate of conversion of agricultural land to nonagricultural uses in China is increasing. Zoning farmland protection is an important measure to protect limited land resource. This article presented an innovative approach based on the integrated use of remote sensing, GIS, and artificial immune systems (AIS) for generating farmland protection areas. Some modifications have been made for conventional AIS so that it can be further extended to the solution of zoning problems. The optimal objective is to generate farmland protection areas that minimize development potential and maximize agricultural suitability and spatial compactness. First, utility function by addressing the criteria of farmland protection is incorporated into AIS algorithm. Second, encoding and mutation of antibodies is modified so that it can be suited to the solution of spatial optimization problems. The AIS-based zoning model was then applied to a case study in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method was an efficient and effective spatial optimization technique, which took only about 194 seconds to generate satisfied farmland protection patterns. Furthermore, the AIS-based zoning model can explore various alternatives conveniently, and it can yield better performances than nonprotection scenario in the utility efficiency of land resources and the site condition for farmland.