Land use evaluation considering soil properties and agricultural infrastructure in black soil region

Systematic assessment of arable land use is a fundamental prerequisite to explore its sustainable development path. Agricultural infrastructure integrated with the tillage conditions and soil properties was used to evaluate the state of regional arable land use and its potential for sustainable productivity. We propose a combined weighting method integrating Delphi and entropy weights to consider both decision objectives and indicator attributes. The proposed approach takes into account both expertise and data feature, making the evaluating results more rational and applicable. The impacts of large‐scale land use change and regional urban distribution on soil properties and agricultural infrastructure were also explored to develop more rational and differentiated conservation strategies. Our evaluation showed that 44% and 48% of the soil properties of arable land in Heilongjiang Province, China, are in the excellent or good grades, respectively, meaning that no or only minor remediation measures are needed to achieve optimum conditions. Agricultural infrastructure deserves more attention from the management than soil properties, as only 16% and 24% of area have the same excellent and good grades. The results of the evaluation with a combination of subjective and objective weights are closer to a normal distribution curve than if only expert weights are used, which confirms our hypothesis that the new weighting method is more reasonable. The newly proposed weighted design method and index provide a better understanding of the sustainable productivity of agricultural areas and have a promising application in large‐scale black soil areas worldwide. The future rough growth strategy for resources will result in degradation and posed risks to regional ecological conservation. At the provincial level (up to 130 km), agricultural infrastructure declines and then rises as fields move away from cities, with the inflection point at 55 km. State‐owned farms are mainly responsible for this inflection point, which shift the agents of arable land from small farmers to large capital, with remote arable land receiving more investment. The impact mechanisms of urbanization should be deeper explored to address the challenges for arable land conservation.