**5. Conclusions**

In this study, the GYRR was selected as the research area. The land cover change analysis, as well as simulation and prediction of future land cover, was performed, focusing especially on the analysis of the relationship between land cover in mountainous areas and mountain hazards. This work verifies that the MOLUSCE plug-in could be effectively applied to land cover simulation on a large regional scale. Based on the analysis in the current study, the following conclusions are drawn:

(1) Based on multi-period land cover data and physical and socioeconomic factors, the logistic regression and CA model within the MOLUSCE plugin in QGIS software was used to perform the future simulation of land cover in the GYRR. This could provide a reference for related research, especially for large regional-scale land cover simulation.

(2) The decrease in farmland and the increase in forest land illustrate the efforts made by the governmen<sup>t</sup> and residents of the GYRR in improving the ecological environment during the past 25 years.

(3) According to the simulation and prediction results for land cover in 2030, the agricultural land will decrease, and the forest land will increase. At the same time, the increase in land cover in residential areas could not be ignored, which indicates the continuous development of urbanization in the GYRR. On the other hand, landscape pattern index analysis shows that the land cover in the GYRR may enter a roughly stable development stage when it reaches a certain degree in 2030.

(4) Returning farmland to forest and grassland in the GYRR is conducive to ecological improvement. On the other hand, although the residential areas in mountainous areas were built as far away as possible from the mountain hazard points during construction, there could be a problem of rapid and haphazard urbanization, which should also be paid attention to.

**Author Contributions:** C.G., J.I. and D.C. designed the method, conceived the experiments. C.G. and D.C. analyzed the data; C.G., D.C., J.I. and S.Y. wrote the paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was supported by the Research Topics of Henan Social Science Federation (SKL-2022-2717), the National Natural Science Foundation of China: (grant No. 42171186), the Major Project of China National Social Science Fund in Art (grant No. 21ZD03), and the Research Start-up Fund of Henan University (No. CX3050A0250560, Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, NRPU project No.15732).

**Data Availability Statement:** Publicly available datasets were used in this study. We have added the relevant data URL in the article.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank all colleagues who gave us help during this study. We hope that the relevant research on the Yellow River basin could consider the same research area of GYRR, especially the research related to the archaeology and cultural heritage of the Yellow River.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
