Unraveling the Dual Impacts of Urbanization on Agricultural Habitats: A Telecoupling Perspective From Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

Urbanization exerts multifaceted pressures on agricultural systems by directly converting cropland into built‐up land and indirectly inducing cropland expansion elsewhere through displacement. However, most existing studies have narrowly focused on local land use/land cover changes, lacking an integrated understanding of how urbanization reshapes agricultural habitats through both direct and indirect pathways across regions. To address this gap, this study employs a telecoupling framework to assess the dual impacts of urbanization on agricultural habitats in Zhejiang Province, China. This study quantified cropland loss and cropland displacement driven by food production demand using land use/land cover conversion data, and applied a scenario‐based approach to distinguish the direct and indirect effects of urbanization on agricultural habitat quality. Between 2000 and 2020, built‐up land expanded by 158.09%, resulting in a 17.89% reduction in cropland. Urbanization directly caused a 15.44% loss in agricultural habitat and indirectly led to a 5.08% decline through the degradation of surrounding cropland. Although cropland displacement contributed to a 15.57% increase in agricultural habitat in other areas, these gains were achieved primarily at the expense of forested ecosystems and exhibited spatial mismatches with the original losses. These findings reveal that the indirect ecological responses to urbanization may partially counterbalance habitat losses locally, but also introduce potential trade‐offs and externalize ecological costs to distant landscapes. Our results highlight the importance of recognizing urban–rural teleconnections in land use planning and call for more integrative and spatially coordinated strategies to safeguard agricultural landscapes and biodiversity under ongoing urban expansion.