Objective The aim was to provide a basis for ensuring the sustainable use of the regional cultivated land system and food security, by exploring the characteristics and obstacle factors of cultivated land resilience in major grain-producing areas of Sichuan Province.

Methods Taking Nanchong City as the study area, an evaluation index system for cultivated land resilience was constructed based on the theoretical interpretation of the PSR model. Meanwhile, entropy weight method, natural breaking classification method and spatial autocorrelation model were adopted to analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of cultivated land resilience in Nanchong from 2004 to 2023, and the obstacle degree model was used to grasp its obstacle factors.

Result ① The cultivated land resilience was an important characteristic for maintaining the structural and functional stability of cultivated land system under the influence of internal and external environmental factors, which was in line with the core logic of the PSR model of "pressure-state-response". ② In terms of time sequence, the cultivated land resilience in Nanchong had generally fluctuated upward from 2004 to 2023, and its pressure-state-response dimension had gone through three evolution stages: pressure dominance, state restoration and response lag, and coordinated improvement and dynamic balance. ③ Spatially, the cultivated land resilience in Nanchong showed a spatial differentiation characteristic evolving from "high in the west and low in the east" to "high in the north and middle in the south", and presented a spatial agglomeration feature of "high-high concentration in the southwest, no significant transition in the middle, and low-low concentration in the northeast" along the southwest - northeast axis. ④ The obstacle degree showed that in the resilience criterion layer of cultivated land in Nanchong, the pressure dimension was the greatest obstacle. In the indicator layer, the amount of chemical fertilizer applied per unit area, the amount of pesticide used per unit area, the average annual temperature, the annual precipitation, the per capita cultivated land area, the per capita food security rate, the total power of agricultural machinery per unit area, and the proportion of cultivated land retention were the important restrictive factors.

Conclusion The countermeasures and suggestions were put forward to further enhance the cultivated land resilience in Nanchong, such as strengthening the rigid constraints of cultivated land resource protection, building a regional governance system for cultivated land resilience, and establishing a collaborative governance mechanism involving multiple subjects.