LandExplorer-CL: An Integrated Vehicle–UAV–Cloud System for Monitoring and Verifying Suspected Illegal Cultivated Land Occupation

Cultivated land (CL) is a critical foundation for ensuring food security and sustainable development. However, in recent years, driven by factors, such as population growth and economic expansion, cultivated land has faced threats, including illegal occupation. Advanced technologies and equipment are essential for the protection and monitoring of cultivated land. Although satellite remote sensing technologies can periodically monitor cultivated land changes on a large scale, their timeliness and flexibility are limited by revisit cycles and weather conditions. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide high-resolution imagery and a wide field of view in field surveys. However, current UAV-based systems often lack automated data processing and sufficient mobility, which limits operational efficiency. To address these issues, this article proposes and implements LandExplorer-CL, an integrated vehicle–UAV–cloud system for monitoring and verifying suspected illegal cultivated land occupation. The system integrates a ground vehicle with off-road mobility and an automated UAV docking station. Together, these components form a highly mobile and rapidly deployable intelligent operation platform. Through the design of a specialized target detection model, the system achieves high-precision detection of suspected illegal occupation targets in cultivated land. In addition, an intelligent land-cover change analysis framework enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation and large multimodal models is utilized to reduce hallucinations and dependence on massive labeled samples. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the practical effectiveness of this system in monitoring cultivated land change polygons in large-scale and complex rural environments.