There have long been concerns that federal crop insurance subsidies may significantly impact land use decisions. It is well known that classical insurance market information asymmetry problems can lead to a social excess of risky land entering crop production. Our conceptual model shows that the problem will arise absent any information failures. This is because the subsidy is i) proportional to acres planted, and ii) greatest for the most production risky land.

Changes in the use of land in the United States produce significant economic and environmental effects with important implications for a wide variety of policy issues, including protection of wildlife habitat, management of urban growth, and mitigation of global climate change. In contrast to previous descriptive and qualitative analyses of the trends in national land use, this paper uses an econometric approach to isolate the importance of historical changes in land-use profits and key government policies in determining national land-use changes from 1982 to 1997.

We exploited publicly available satellite- and aircraft-based imagery to estimate urban vegetation cover fraction and land use by class for a semiarid urban area that includes Phoenix, AZ, USA, using low-cost and technologically modest tools. This technique is also used to evaluate two satellite-derived tree cover datasets as well as to compare estimates from the present study with land cover data generated from another study performed using the same study domain.

The article presents ecological and economic zoning of the territory of the Republic of Belarus for the purposes of land use planning by the method of average differences, taking into account the factors which influence the efficiency of agricultural lands usage.

The use of three-dimensional (3D) property rights has for many years been a tool for providing secure and lasting rights for the use of land and its volume of space in complex situations involving land use in the urban society. The aim of this article is to investigate the reasons for introducing 3D property in a legal system. This is illustrated by using the Swedish system as an example. In general, without the possibility of forming 3D property units with direct ownership, other forms have to be used, such as indirect ownership or granted user rights.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is one of the main factors that control the terrestrial carbon (C) cycle. We examined the effect of LUCC on topsoil C, microbial biomass C (MBC) and microbes mediated processes related to C circulation and their relationship with other soil properties in low-latitude mountain temperate forests. We selected three sites in the northwest of Cofre de Perote volcano (Mexico) in an altitudinal gradient (piedmont, lower mountain slope and mid slope).

This study detects patterns of land-use and land-cover changes in the last three decades (1972–2004) and analyses its causative factors in the Upper Dijo River catchment, Midwest escarpment of Ethiopian Rift Valley. Data captured through the synergy of an aerial photo, satellite image and ground-based socio-economic survey were analysed by GIS and SPSS. The results showed a decline in shrub-grassland and riverine trees at 21.5 and 16.3 ha per year, respectively, and increase in plantation trees, annual crops and bare/open grasslands at 2.8, 12.5 and 24.8 ha per year, respectively.

Increasing the accuracy of thematic maps produced through the process of image classification has been a hot topic in remote sensing. For this aim, various strategies, classifiers, improvements, and their combinations have been suggested in the literature. Ensembles that combine the prediction of individual classifiers with weights based on the estimated prediction accuracies are strategies aiming to improve the classifier performances.

Sustainable land use planning involves both policy- and farmer-oriented agricultural land use strategies. In this paper, a spatially and temporally explicit multi-scale decision support system that reveals the biophysical indicators affecting land use choices of these different stakeholders, is explained and demonstrated. It comprises three different environmental assessment tools, designed to run with data supplied by traditional soil surveys and organised into a land resources information system.

Population growth in cities along with migration from rural areas dramatically increases the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) changes. This study was conducted in Çanakkale province consisting of central part and its vicinities where rapid population growth and development have been taken place. This study aimed to determine LULC changes using remotely sensed data and geographical information system (GIS) techniques between 1987 and 2010.

Shrub cover has increased in semi-arid regions worldwide. This change has generally been viewed as land degradation, due to shrub-induced declines in pastoral productivity. As a consequence, widespread management treatments to reduce shrub density have been applied in many pastoral areas. These treatments, however, often do not have long-term positive benefits for forage production.