Contextualizing local-scale point sample data using global-scale spatial datasets: Lessons learnt from the analysis of large-scale land acquisitions

This paper examines how the geospatial accuracy of samples and sample size influence conclusions from geospatial analyses. It does so using the example of a study investigating the global phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions and the socio-ecological characteristics of the areas they target. First, we analysed land deal datasets of varying geospatial accuracy and varying sizes and compared the results in terms of land cover, population density, and two indicators for agricultural potential: yield gap and availability of uncultivated land that is suitable for rainfed agriculture. We found that an increase in geospatial accuracy led to a substantial and greater change in conclusions about the land cover types targeted than an increase in sample size, suggesting that using a sample of higher geospatial accuracy does more to improve results than using a larger sample. The same finding emerged for population density, yield gap, and the availability of uncultivated land suitable for rainfed agriculture. Furthermore, the statistical median proved to be more consistent than the mean when comparing the descriptive statistics for datasets of different geospatial accuracy. Second, we analysed effects of geospatial accuracy on estimations regarding the potential for advancing agricultural development in target contexts. Our results show that the target contexts of the majority of land deals in our sample whose geolocation is known with a high level of accuracy contain smaller amounts of suitable, but uncultivated land than regional- and national-scale averages suggest. Consequently, the more target contexts vary within a country, the more detailed the spatial scale of analysis has to be in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the phenomena under investigation. We therefore advise against using national-scale statistics to approximate or characterize phenomena that have a local-scale impact, particularly if key indicators vary widely within a country.

Multifaceted impacts of sustainable land management in drylands: A review

Biophysical restoration or rehabilitation measures of land have demonstrated to be effective in many scientific projects and small-scale environmental experiments. However circumstances such as poverty, weak policies, or inefficient scientific knowledge transmission can hinder the effective upscaling of land restoration and the long term maintenance of proven sustainable use of soil and water. This may be especially worrisome in lands with harsh environmental conditions. This review covers recent efforts in landscape restoration and rehabilitation with a functional perspective aiming to simultaneously achieve ecosystem sustainability, economic efficiency, and social wellbeing. Water management and rehabilitation of ecosystem services in croplands, rangelands, forests, and coastlands are reviewed. The joint analysis of such diverse ecosystems provides a wide perspective to determine: (i) multifaceted impacts on biophysical and socio-economic factors; and (ii) elements influencing effective upscaling of sustainable land management practices. One conclusion can be highlighted: voluntary adoption is based on different pillars, i.e. external material and economic support, and spread of success information at the local scale to demonstrate the multidimensional benefits of sustainable land management. For the successful upscaling of land management, more attention must be paid to the social system from the first involvement stage, up to the long term maintenance.

Free Riders, Holdouts, and Public Use: A Tale of Two Externalities

Free riders and holdouts are market failures that potentially impede the completion of otherwise beneficial transactions. The key difference is that the free rider problem is a demand side externality that requires taxation to compel payment for a public good, while the holdout problem is a supply side externality that requires eminent domain to force the sale of land for large scale projects. This paper highlights that distinction between these two problems and uses the resulting insights to clarify the meaning of the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment takings clause.

Mapping decadal land cover changes in the woodlands of north eastern Namibia using the Landsat satellite archive (1975-2014)

Woodland savannahs provide essential ecosystem functions and services to communities. On the African continent, they are widely utilized and converted to intensive land uses. This study investigates the land cover changes of 108,038 km**2 in NE Namibia using multi-temporal, multi-sensor Landsat imagery, at decadal intervals from 1975 to 2014, with a post-classification change detection method and supervised Regression Tree classifiers. We discuss likely impacts of land tenure and reforms over the past four decades on changes in land use and land cover. These changes included losses, gains and exchanges between predominant land cover classes. Exchanges comprised logical conversions between woodland and agricultural classes, implying woodland clearing for arable farming, cropland abandonment and vegetation succession. The most dominant change was a reduction in the area of the woodland class due to the expansion of the agricultural class, specifically, small-scale cereal and pastoral production. Woodland area decreased from 90% of the study area in 1975 to 83% in 2014, while cleared land increased from 9% to 14%. We found that the main land cover changes are conversion from woodland to agricultural and urban land uses, driven by urban expansion and woodland clearing for subsistence-based agriculture and pastoralism.

Time-series of seagrass and land cover maps from 1972 to 2010, in South East Queensland, Australia, with links to GeoTIFFs

Long term global archives of high-moderate spatial resolution, multi-spectral satellite imagery are now readily accessible, but are not being fully utilised by management agencies due to the lack of appropriate methods to consistently produce accurate and timely management ready information. This work developed an object-based remote sensing approach to map land cover and seagrass distribution in an Australian coastal environment for a 38 year Landsat image time-series archive (1972-2010). Landsat Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) imagery were used without in situ field data input (but still using field knowledge) to produce land and seagrass cover maps every year data were available, resulting in over 60 map products over the 38 year archive. Land cover was mapped annually using vegetation, bare ground, urban and agricultural classes. Seagrass distribution was also mapped annually, and in some years monthly, via horizontal projected foliage cover classes, sand and deep water. Land cover products were validated using aerial photography and seagrass maps were validated with field survey data, producing several measures of accuracy. An average overall accuracy of 65% and 80% was reported for seagrass and land cover products respectively, which is consistent with other studies in the area. This study is the first to show moderate spatial resolution, long term annual changes in land cover and seagrass in an Australian environment, created without the use of in situ data; and only one of a few similar studies globally. The land cover products identify several long term trends; such as significant increases in South East Queensland's urban density and extent, vegetation clearing in rural and rural-residential areas, and inter-annual variation in dry vegetation types in western South East Queensland. The seagrass cover products show that there has been a minimal overall change in seagrass extent, but that seagrass cover level distribution is extremely dynamic; evidenced by large scale migrations of higher seagrass cover levels and several sudden and significant changes in cover level. These mapping products will allow management agencies to build a baseline assessment of their resources, understand past changes and help inform implementation and planning of management policy to address potential future changes.

An empirical analysis on the efficiency of the microfinance investment market

This paper empirically analyzes the market efficiency of microfinance investment funds. For the empirical analysis, we use an index of the microfinance investment funds and apply two kinds of variance ratio tests to examine whether or not this index follows a random walk. We use the entire sample period from December 2003 to June 2010 as well as two sub-samples which divide the entire period before and after January 2007. The empirical evidence demonstrates that the index does not follow a random walk, suggesting that the market of the microfinance investment funds is not efficient. This result is not affected by changes in either empirical techniques or sample periods.

Valuation of a new entrant in an oligopolistic market, including its option to abandon: A real-life case

The purpose of this paper is to increase current empirical evidence on the relevance of real options for explaining firm investment decisions in oligopolistic markets. We study an actual investment case in the Spanish mobile telephony industry, the entrant in the market of a new operator, Yoigo. We analyze the option to abandon in order to show the relevance of the possibility of selling the company in an oligopolistic market where competitors are not allowed free entrance. The NPV (net present value) of the new entrant is calculated as a starting point. Then, based on the general approach proposed by Copeland and Antikarov (2001), a binomial tree is used to model managerial flexibility in discrete time periods, and value the option to abandon. The strike price of the option is calculated based on incremental EBITDA margins due to selling customers or merging with a competitor.

Assessing the impact of adaptive accessibility on the optimal transport policy implementation by using an integrated land-use/transport model for Madrid

Accessibility is an essential concept widely used to evaluate the impact of land-use and transport strategies in transport and urban planning. Accessibility is typically evaluated by using a transport model or a land-use model independently or successively without a feedback loop, thus neglecting the interaction effects between the two systems and the induced competition effects among opportunities due to accessibility improvements. More than a mere methodological curiosity, failure to account for land- use/transport interactions and the competition effect may result in large underestimation of the policy effects. With the recent development of land-use and transport interaction (LUTI) models, there is a growing interest in using these models to adequately measure accessibility and evaluate its impact. The current study joins this research stream by embedding an accessibility measure in a LUTI model with two main aims. The first aim is to account for adaptive accessibility, namely the adjustment of the potential accessibility due to the effect of competition among opportunities (e.g., workplaces) as a result of improved accessibility. LUTI models are particularly suitable for assessing adaptive accessibility because the competition factor is a function of the number of jobs, which is related to land-use attractiveness and the number of workers which is related, among other factors, to the transport demand. The second aim is to identify the optimal implementation scenario of policy measures on the basis of the potential and adaptive accessibility and analyse the results in terms of social welfare and accessibility. The metropolitan area of Madrid is used as a case-study and two transport policy instruments, namely a cordon toll and bus frequency increase, have been chosen for the simulation study in order to present the usefulness of the approach to urban planners and policy makers. The MARS model (Metropolitan Activity Relocation Simulator) calibrated for Madrid was employed as the analysis tool. The impact of accessibility is embedded in the model through a social welfare function that includes not only costs and benefits to both road users and transport operators, but also costs and benefits for the government and society in general (external costs). An optimisation procedure is performed by the MARS model for maximizing the value of objective function in order to find the best (optimal) policy imp lementations intensity (i.e., price, frequency). Last, the two policy strategies are evaluated in terms of their accessibility. Results show that the accessibility with competition factor influences the optimal policy implementation level and also generates different results in terms of social welfare. In addition, mapping the difference between the potential and the adaptive accessibility indicators shows that the main changes occur in areas where there is a strong competition among land-use opportunities.

Climate Change and Restoration of Degraded Land

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Durban 2011, delivered a breakthrough on the international community's response to climate change. In the second largest meeting of its kind, the negotiations advanced, in a balanced fashion, the implementation of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan, and the Cancun Agreements. The outcomes included a decision by Parties to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, and no later than 2015. One of the decisions adopted by COP 17 and CMP 7 regard to the land use, land-use change and forestry, and invites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to review and, if necessary, update supplementary methodologies for estimating anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks resulting from land use, land-use change and forestry activities under Article 3, paragraphs 3 and 4, of the Kyoto Protocol. Land degradation is a human-induced or natural process which negatively affects the productivity of land within an ecosystem. The direct causes of land degradation are geographically specific. Climate change, including changes in short-term variation, as well as long-term gradual changes in temperature and precipitation, is expected to be an additional stress on rates of land degradation. Book Topics: • Introduction to Climate Change and Land Degradation • Change Mitigation • Climate Change and Waste Land Restoration • Water Management and Planning • Erosion and Hydrological Restoration • Forest Fire Land Restoration • Polluted Soils Restoration • Combating Climate Change by Restoration of Degraded Land • Research Matters – Climate Change Governance • Advanced Statistics Climate Change and Restoration of Degraded Land is of interests to academics, engineers, consultans, designers and professionals involved in restoration of degraded lands projects.

An extension of Mohring’s model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Poi Et on , 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the dura-bility of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.

Can small horticulture crops improve family farm incomes in mountains areas of Central America?

Small family farm in mountain areas can found in horticulture one alternative to increase incomes. Horticulture crop required more labour and increased the land intensification. Market of production will be the key factor in the future of this family farms.

A tale of oversimplification and deregulation: the mainstream approach to labour market segmentation and the recent responses to the crisis in European countries. WP C.S.D.L.E. “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 102/2013

After advocating flexibilization of non-standard work contracts for many years, some European and international institutions and several policy makers now indicate the standard employment relationship and its regulation as a cause of segmentation between the labour market of "guaranteed" insiders, employed under permanent contracts with effective protection against unfair dismissal, and the market of the “not-guaranteed” outsiders, working with non-standard contracts. Reforms of employment legislation are therefore being promoted and approved in different countries, allegedly aiming to balance the legal protection afforded to standard and non-standard workers. This article firstly argues that this approach is flawed as it oversimplifies reasons of segmentation as it concentrates on an “insiders-outsiders” discourse that cannot easily be transplanted in continental Europe. After reviewing current legislative changes in Italy, Spain and Portugal, it is then argued that lawmakers are focused on “deregulation” rather than “balancing protection” when approving recent reforms. Finally, the mainstream approach to segmentation and some of its derivative proposals, such as calls to introduce a “single permanent contract”, are called into question, as they seem to neglect the essential role of job protection in underpinning the effectiveness of fundamental and constitutional rights at the workplace.

Land Markets in the EU Candidate Countries of Croatia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 1, September 2011

The paper provides an overview and a comparison of land markets covering the three candidate countries for European Union membership: Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia and Turkey. It analyses and compares agricultural land structures and factors driving land markets, based on the available cross-section and time-series evidence on agricultural land structures and land productivity (yields). The land productivity measured by production per hectare of agricultural land varies between the three countries. Agricultural land structures are the result of historical evolution in land markets and land-leasing developments with additional different institutional environments and agrarian and land reforms.

The Valuation of Agricultural Land and the Influence of Government Payments. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 10, December 2011

This study gives an overview of the theoretical foundations, empirical procedures and derived results of the literature identifying determinants of land prices. Special attention is given to the effects of different government support policies on land prices. Since almost all empirical studies on the determination of land prices refer either to the net present value method or the hedonic pricing approach as a theoretical basis, a short review of these models is provided. While the two approaches have different theoretical bases, their empirical implementation converges. Empirical studies use a broad range of variables to explain land values and we systematise those into six categories. In order to investigate the influence of different measures of government support on land prices, a meta-regression analysis is carried out. Our results reveal a significantly higher rate of capitalisation for decoupled direct payments and a significantly lower rate of capitalisation for agri-environmental payments, as compared to the rest of government support. Furthermore, the results show that taking theoretically consistent land rents (returns to land) and including non-agricultural variables like urban pressure in the regression implies lower elasticities of capitalisation. In addition, we find a significant influence of the land type, the data type and estimation techniques on the capitalisation rate.