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Agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China is the prominent area for agricultural production, but it is also the most typical ecological fragile area with frequent drought disasters. Taking Yulin City at Shaanxi Province in China as the case area, the paper aims to investigate the spatio-temporal changes of agricultural vulnerability to drought in China's agro-pastoral ecotone in the period 2000 to 2020. The results show that: 1) the agricultural vulnerability to drought in Yulin City has shifted from high vulnerability in the period 2000–2010 to low vulnerability in the period 2011–2020. 2) There exist obvious spatio-temporal differences of the agricultural vulnerability to drought in Yulin City during the research period. 3) Four sensitive events and 14 resilient events were identified in the research and the crops of Yulin had become more resilient to drought. Finally, the paper put forward with policy implications to make adaptive strategies of agriculture to climate change in China's agro-pastoral ecotone in the future, e.g., carrying out agricultural zoning based on agricultural production conditions, intensifying the construction of disaster prevention and relief system, and integrating with modern agricultural technology to develop new type agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sandy area along the Great Wall in northern Shaanxi Province of China, is located in the transition zone between the Maowusu Desert and the loess hills and gullies region, with a vast territory and large per capita of cultivated agricultural land. However, the cultivated land quality is generally poor due to the local natural conditions. It is of practical significance to find ways to improve the quality of agricultural land and put forward targeted measures for its improvement. Through the analysis of farmland gradation results in the study area, we calculated an improvement potential index with a model to determine the primary limiting factors of agricultural land quality in the study area. The results indicate that both singe-factor and combined-factor limitations exist in the region. The single-factor limiting types include soil thickness, organic content, irrigation, salinization, etc., while the combined-factor limiting types include the combinations of the irrigation water source and irrigation firm probability, soil structure and organic matter, soil thickness and soil texture, and so on. Through the analysis of the potential index model results, we determined the main limiting factors in agricultural production, which vary spatially throughout the region, and suggested targeted measures to improve the cultivated land quality. These measures will then promote revitalization of sandy rural areas along the great wall in northern Shaanxi Province, China. • Studied and analyzed the potentiality of improving cultivated land quality and put forward some targeted improving measurement to establish a mechanism for improving cultivated quality land and improve the quality of cultivated land. • Clarified the main limiting factors of cultivated land quality in the sandy area along the Great Wall in north Shaanxi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]