LandFragmentS: A New Model for Measuring Land Fragmentation

Land fragmentation, which implies a defective land tenure structure, is a major problem at various spatial scales, and may hinder effective agricultural production and sustainable rural development. Policy decisions to reduce land fragmentation require reliable measurement indices. However, current indices present significant weaknesses since they do not take all of the relevant factors into account. In particular, they ignore critical spatial parameters such as the shape of parcels and non-spatial parameters such as the ownership type and the existence or absence of road access for each parcel. Furthermore, there is no user flexibility in the selection of the variables that could be contained in the fragmentation index, and the factors are given the same weight or level of importance, which may not always be realistic.