We examined interactions between landscape structure, land management and soil organic carbon (SOC; top 30 cm) within the densely populated village landscapes of the Yangtze Delta Plain based on an intensive field study in Yixing Municipal, a regionally-representative sample of the Yangtze Delta Plain. We mapped landscapes at a high spatial resolution and classified them into ecologically-distinct features (ecotopes) by the direct interpretation and field validation of features in 2002 IKONOS imagery using a standardized mapping procedure. We then collected samples of soils and sediments for analysis at random points within ecotope features selected by a regionally-weighted stratified sampling design. The five most extensive land use / land cover categories in the Yangtze Delta Plain were paddy, built structures with impervious cover, aquaculture, rainfed annual and irrigated perennial croplands, which occupied 83% of the total area and contained 85% of the total SOC stored in the region’s village landscapes. Regional scaling analysis indicates that 2.13×10⁶ hm^２ of Yangtze Delta Plain village landscapes (estimated from Landsat imagery) sequestered 76.97 Tg of SOC, of which 48% was in paddy land (37 Tg), covering 42% of the region’s total surface area (0.89×10⁶ hm^２). By combining a regionally-stratified sample of fine-scale landscape features with a regionally-weighted upscaling analysis, the role of land use / land cover in determining local SOC patterns and the regional consequences of these patterns were revealed across a densely populated agricultural region of China. This fine-scale approach to investigating land management practices and their impacts on soil carbon and other ecosystem properties offers significant advantages over conventional lower-resolution methods for land cover and SOC assessments based on the regional soil types.