Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Land Cover and Their Driving Forces in the Yellow River Basin since 1990

The national strategy for ecological protection and high-quality development is raising the ecological security protection to an unprecedented level in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) of China. Due to the explicitly analyzed land cover changes under climate change and rapid urbanization in the YRB area since 1990, land cover dynamic degree index, transfer matrix, and geo-detector method were used to explicate land cover changes and their key driving factors, based on the spatial data of land cover from 1990 to 2020. The results show that grasslands, croplands, and forests are the main land cover types, accounting for 48.37%, 25.05%, and 13.50%, respectively, of the total area in the YRB area. Grassland, cropland, and cropland are the major land cover type, accounting for 61.49%, 37.13%, and 66.33%, respectively, in the upstream, midstream, and downstream of the YRB area. Built-up land has showed a continual increasing trend, and its dynamic degree was up to 3.38% between 2010 and 2020. Population density was a key factor for land cover change, with an average contribution rate of 0.264; then, elevation and temperature also expressed an important role to drive the land cover change in the YRB area during the period from 1990 to 2020.