Impacts of land consolidation on rural human–environment system in typical watershed of the Loess Plateau and implications for rural development policy

•Gully land consolidation (GLC) could contribute to the optimization of land use structure and landscape pattern.•GLC could also help to guarantee the ecological security of watershed.•Limited development capacity and collective action could restrict local community’s social-economic response to GLC.•Land consolidation should be seen and evaluated in a broader rural development context.•The theory of human-environment system provides new perspective for analyzing the effects of land consolidation. Exploring the impact of land consolidation on the evolution of rural human-environment system (HES) is of positive significance for optimizing land consolidation model and innovating rural development policy. Taken a typical small watershed in Yan'an city as case study area, this paper explored the impact of gully land consolidation (GLC) on local HES from the perspectives of land use, landscape pattern, ecological security, social-economic response and comprehensive evaluation, based on high-resolution remote sensing image data, landscape pattern analysis and household surveys. The results showed that: (1) GLC could contribute to the improvement of land use structure. The terraces, sloping fields, shrub land and grassland at the bottom and both sides of the gully were mostly converted to high quality check dam land. Some of the shrub land were converted to more ecologically suitable native forest due to biological measures. (2) GLC could also help to optimize the landscape pattern. The average patch area and patch cohesion index of the check dam land increased, which indicated that the function of production improved. The landscape shape index and patch cohesion index of forestland and shrub land kept at a high level, and thus their ecological function was stable. At the watershed level, the fragmentation degree of landscape decreased, the landscape tended to be more diversified and balanced, and the anti-jamming capability of landscape and stability of ecosystem improved. (3) GLC have positive effects on the ecological security. Vegetation cover, ecological environment and capacity of flood control improved significantly, and soil erosion decreased by 55%. And (4) human activities responded to the changes of geographical environment. The scale of agricultural production, agricultural mechanization, diversity and non-agriculturalization of employment increased. However, the structure of agriculture is still unitary, the efficiency of agriculture is still low, an