Advancing Land Use Modeling with Rice Cropping Intensity: A Geospatial Study on the Shrinking Paddy Fields in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia faces significant challenges in meeting food security targets due to rapid agricultural land loss, with approximately 1.22 million hectares of rice fields converted between 1990 and 2022. Therefore, this study developed a prediction model for the loss of rice fields by 2030, incorporating land productivity attributes, specifically rice cropping intensity/RCI, using geospatial technology—a novel method with a resolution of approximately 10 m for quantifying ecosystem service (ES) impacts. Land use/land cover data from Landsat images (2013, 2020, 2024) were classified using the Random Forest algorithm on Google Earth Engine. The prediction model was developed using a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network and Markov Cellular Automata (MLP-NN Markov-CA) algorithms. Additionally, time series Sentinel-1A satellite imagery was processed using K-means and a hierarchical clustering analysis to map rice fields and their RCI. The validation process confirmed high model robustness, with an MLP-NN Markov-CA accuracy and Kappa coefficient of 83.90% and 0.91, respectively. The present study, which was conducted in Indramayu Regency (West Java), predicted that 1602.73 hectares of paddy fields would be lost within 2020–2030, specifically 980.54 hectares (61.18%) and 622.19 hectares (38.82%) with 2 RCI and 1 RCI, respectively. This land conversion directly threatens ES, resulting in a projected loss of 83,697.95 tons of rice production, which indicates a critical degradation of service provisioning. The findings provide actionable insights for land use planning to reduce agricultural land conversion while outlining the urgency of safeguarding ES values. The adopted method is applicable to regions with similar characteristics.