**1. Introduction**

All lives on the earth depend on land, which is the material basis for human survival and development. Land use refers to the activities related to the focused development and utilization of land resources by human beings, such as industrial land, agricultural land, residential land, transportation land, etc. Land cover refers to the natural or man-made

**Citation:** Gao, C.; Cheng, D.; Iqbal, J.; Yao, S. Spatiotemporal Change Analysis and Prediction of the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR) Land Cover and the Relationship Analysis with Mountain Hazards. *Land* **2023**, *12*, 340. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land12020340

Academic Editors: Matej Vojtek, Andrea Petroselli and Raffaele Pelorosso

Received: 29 December 2022 Revised: 25 January 2023 Accepted: 25 January 2023 Published: 27 January 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

coverage of the land surface. The material coverage related to various land uses mentioned above includes crops, forests, grasslands, houses, and so on. Therefore, the land use is a process occurring on the earth's surface, while the land cover is the result of various surface processes. Whether at the regional scale, national scale, or even global scale, change in land use is constantly causing the accelerated change of land cover [1,2].

Land use/land cover (LULC) changes affect the natural basis of human survival and development. Climate, soil, vegetation, water resources, and biodiversity are deeply affected. They are closely related to global climate change, biodiversity reduction, ecological environment evolution, and the sustainability of human–environment interaction [3]. The research on land use and land cover changes could provide some reference for policy formulation, land planning, and many other aspects. Nowadays, LULC change research has become one of the core topics of global change research [4]. Many national governmen<sup>t</sup> agencies, scientific research departments, and social groups are paying attention to land use and land cover change research, which involves a series of major issues such as the protection and managemen<sup>t</sup> of the ecological environment [5,6], the effective development and rational protection of regional resources [7], the protection of arable land and food security [8], and the sustainable development of the social economy [9,10].

At present, there are many models that analyze and simulate land use and land cover change, such as the Markov chain model [11,12], cellular automata model [13], the future land use simulation (FLUS) model [14], cellular automata Markov (CA–Markov) model [15], SLEUTH [16,17], etc. Every model has its own specialty for addressing the composite issues of land use and land cover changes. Now, various LULC prediction models have also been applied to different regional scales. Han et al. [18] simulated future land use scenarios for Beijing from 2010 to 2020 by combining the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) model with a Markov model. Arsanjani et al. [19] used a hybrid model consisting of the logistic regression model, Markov chain (MC), and cellular automata (CA) to improve the performance of the standard logistic regression model, and predicted the future land use for 2016 and 2026 in the metropolitan area of Tehran, Iran. Kafy et al. [20] used the Cellular Automata (CA) and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) machine learning algorithms to simulate the LULC and seasonal land surface temperature (LST) scenarios of Chattogram, Bangladesh for 2029 and 2039. Puangkaew and Ongsomwang [21] simulated the LULC data of Phuket Island using the CLUE-S model. Based on the CA–Markov model, Chen et al. obtained a predicted land use map of a hilly area, Jiangle, China, for 2014. Li et al. [22] presented a Future Land-Use Simulation (FLUS) system to simulate global LUCC in relation to human–environment interactions from 2010 to 2100. In general, people may pay more attention to the simulation of land use and land cover on medium and small scales. However, with the deepening of cross regional economic and cultural exchanges, the simulation of land use and land cover on a large regional scale is receiving more and more attention [23]. The improvement of computer computing ability also provides conditions for the simulation of land use and land cover on a large regional scale.

In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Yellow River Basin, the Chinese governmen<sup>t</sup> has set the ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin national strategies that are equally as important as the coordinated development of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei, the development of the Yangtze River economic belt, the construction of the Great Bay area of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao, and the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta [24]. In this study, we performed the analysis of land cover changes and modeled the future scenario of Land cover with the help of the Modules for Land Use Change Simulation (MOLUSCE) plugin within QGIS software [25]. As compared with other land cover simulation tools, MOLUSCE has the advantages of being open source, free of charge, and simple to operate. We used land cover data from 1995 to 2020 with a five-year interval, along with spatial variables, such as elevation, relief, slope, monthly average temperature, annual precipitation, river network density, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population, road network density, and city density.

The logistic regression was used to construct transition potential modeling, and the Cellular Automata was used to do the future land cover simulation of 2030. On the other hand, we analyzed the land cover changes between different years, especially the land cover changes in the mountainous areas of the Great Yellow River Region (GYRR), and comprehensively discussed relationships between land cover and the mountain hazards in this region. This study confirms that the MOLUSCE plug-in could be effectively applied to the simulation of land cover on a large regional scale, and it is also an attempt to explore the relationship between land cover change and mountain hazards on a large regional scale.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**

#### *2.1. Study Area*

The Yellow River, located in the north-central part of China (Figure 1), is the secondlongest river in China, with a total length of 5464 km [26]. It flows through the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, Inner Mongolia Plateau, Loess Plateau, and Huang-Huai-Hai Plain [27], and goes through nine provinces, including Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong [28,29]. The terrain of the Yellow River Basin is high in the West and low in the East [30]. According to statistics, the total area of the Yellow River Basin is 795,000 km<sup>2</sup> [31,32]. The annual average temperature of the basin is about 7 °C and the annual average precipitation is about 440 mm [33]. Now, the Yellow River basin has become one of the most vulnerable areas of ecological environment in China due to its complex landforms and climate differences. Serious water pollution, land desertification, gradual reduction of runoff, intensified soil erosion, and vegetation degradation [34] have become the focus of sustainable development of the Yellow River Basin. On 18 September 2019, the "Ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River River Basin" was upgraded to a major national strategy by the China's governmen<sup>t</sup> on a forum in Zhengzhou, Henan, China [35,36].

It should be noted that the Yellow River is a special river which exists in the form of suspended river on the ground in the lower reaches. According to statistics, thousands of years before, and until, 1946, the Yellow River burst 1593 times, and 26 major river diversions occurred [37–39]. Among them, the northernmost diversion occupied the Hai River and flowed into the Bohai Sea; the southernmost diversion passed through the Huai River (Figure 1). Considering the particularity of the Yellow River, we believe that the relevant research on the Yellow River cannot be limited to the existing basin, because its lower reaches are bounded by artificial levees and do not show a natural state. Therefore, we selected the Yellow River Basin, the Huai River Basin, and the Hai River Basin, which all are greatly affected by the Yellow River, to form the GYRR (Figure 1), and used them as the research area in response to "ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin". For the GYRR, relevant scholars have put forward similar concepts, such as the "Great Yellow River theory" of Guo [40], which defines a similar research area to guide relevant researchers to explore the development, evolution, generation, watershed size, source, rheology, estuary, river length, disaster, and contribution of the Yellow River. Mostern [41], in his book "The Yellow River-A Natural and Unnatural history", also selected a similar study area to introduce many research aspects of the Yellow River, such as history, loess, levies, and levees.

The GYRR is bounded by the Yanshan and Yinshan Mountains in the north, Helan and Qilian Mountains in the west, Qinling and Dabie Mountains in the South, and Bohai and Yellow Sea in the East. The division of the surrounding mountains causes the GYRR to become an independent geographical unit. The Yellow River, which has changed its course for many times, has become the tie linking different parts of the geographical unit. This area has become the main and core area of the Yellow River civilization. In terms of administrative divisions, the GYRR occupies all of Shandong, Shanxi, and Ningxia, most places in Henan and Hebei, the east part of Qinghai, the middle and north parts of Shaanxi, the north part of Jiangsu and Anhui, the south part of Gansu, the northwest corner of Sichuan, and the middle part of Inner Mongolia. A total of 12 provinces are involved.

In terms of geomorphology, the western areas of the GYRR are the mountainous areas, while the eastern part is a large area of alluvial plains. The area percentage of plains and platforms is about 34.96%, and that of mountainous areas is 65.04% (Figure 2).

**Figure 1.** GYRR extent, including the Yellow River Basin, the Huai River Basin, and the Hai River Basin. A similar region concept has been recognized and mentioned by many scholars [40,41]. Historically, the Yellow River has burst and changed its course many times, affecting a wide area. At present, the lower reaches of the Yellow River are overland rivers, which are not natural rivers, but are significantly affected by human activities. Therefore, the study of the Yellow River should consider the history and river characteristics. It is more reasonable to take the area affected by the Yellow River as the study area of the Yellow River. In particular, we propose that historical archaeologists may take this area as the research area for Yellow River civilization archaeology.

**Figure 2.** Landforms of the GYRR. The mountainous areas occupy about two-thirds of the GYRR. The cultural exchange in the GYRR is convenient, and forms the unique Yellow River civilization.
