Rural land consolidation projects (RLCPs) have become one of the largest organized human activities to change land use patterns and impact terrestrial ecosystems, and it may also be an important precondition to improving ecosystem service value (ESV). Evaluating the change in ecosystem service value (ESV) is an important basis for measuring the effectiveness of RLCPs. Therefore, this paper, taking RLCPs implemented at County Level in Hubei Province, China, as an example, uses the improved ESV evaluation model to analyze the spatial differentiation of ESV change in RLCPs and then adopts geographic detectors and a geographically weighted regression model to identify the dominant factors affecting the ESV change in RLCPs. The results showed that (1) although RLCPs make the unevenness of land use obvious, they reduce the complexity of land use evidently and improve the dominance of land use significantly; (2) The ESV of RLCPs in 71 counties of Hubei Province increased, with an average increase of USD 2.37 × 10⁷ a⁻¹. The ESV increase is large in central Hubei, while small in eastern and western Hubei. However, the increase rate of ESV is high in eastern and central-north Hubei, while low in western and central-south Hubei. This indicates that RLCPs can effectively promote ESV, but there are significant regional differences, and (3) the ESV increase is positively correlated with GDP and construction scale, but negatively linked with investment and per capita income of rural residents. The ESV increase rate is negatively associated with cultivated land proportion and land use diversification index change, but it is positively related to the change in the land use evenness index. However, their driving effects have significant spatial heterogeneity.

The instability of farmland rights is the fundamental reason for the decrease in the “stickiness” of farmland in China. The Land Certificated Program (LCP) plays an important role in clarifying the ownership of land and stabilizing the property rights of land, as well as enhancing the land production function. Most existing literature focuses on the impact of the LCP on non-agricultural labor participation, while research on agricultural labor participation is scarce. This paper analyzes the impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness” based on the perspective of land production function. This paper also applies propensity score matching (PSM) using CLDS data from 2016 and 2018 to evaluate the policy effect of the LCP on farmland “stickiness”, and conducts heterogeneity analysis and the robustness test. In addition, this paper examines the mechanism of the influence of LCP on farmland “stickiness” by using the mediating effect model. The results of this analysis showed that: (1) The impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness” is significant, as the rate of agricultural labor participation has increased by 4.8% to 4.9%. (2) The incentive effect is heterogeneous, and has significant impacts on non-professional households, as well as on small and medium-sized of farms. (3) The sensitivity test revealed that unobservable factors do not have an impact on the LCP estimation results, and the results of the PSM estimation were robust. (4) The policy effect of the LCP at the village level also confirms the robustness of the promotion effect and the mechanism. (5) Land production function has a partial mediating effect on the impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness”. Given these results, we must begin to consolidate, expand and make good use of the results of the LCP, support the connection between smallholders and modern agriculture, and enhance the land production function in order to stabilize agricultural production and realize agricultural modernization.