Soil erosion is one of the most important forms of land degradation that threatens continued and sustained agricultural production in Ghana. The most severely affected areas are the three northern regions especially Upper East Region, where large tracts of land have been destroyed by water erosion leading to soil depth reduction and decline in soil fertility. This study was carried out in Talen...

This paper proposes a two-layer Conditional Random Field model for simultaneous classification of land cover and land use. Both classification tasks are integrated into a unified graphical model, which is reasonable due to the fact that land cover and land use exhibit strong contextual dependencies. In the CRF, we distinguish a land cover layer and a land use layer. Both layers differ with resp...

This study examined the effect of urbanization on agricultural production in Abia State. Specifically, it categorized the land tenancy status of the farmers, analyzed the effect of urbanization on agricultural productivity and identified the constraints to agricultural productivity. Multistage random sampling technique was used to select the respondents. Primary data collected using structured ...

Rapid urban land expansion and the resulting arable land loss have put food security in China at risk. This paper investigates the characteristics and mechanism of arable land conversion in Beijing using a logistic model based on land-use data for 2001 and 2010. The results suggest that (1) arable land conversion tends to occur near built-up areas, city centers and major roads; (2) arable land ...

Data on the effect of vegetation and land use type on soil organic carbon (SOC) distribution in particle-size and density fractions in the subtropical forest region in China will improve our understanding of the C sequestration potential of those different vegetation-land use types. We quantified SOC in particle size (coarse, medium and fine) and density fractions (light and heavy) under four t...

*Support for this paper was provided by Cooperative Agreement 43-3AEM-3-80137 between USDA and the University of Illinois. It does not represent the official views of either institution. This draft has benefitted from discussions with Ken Chomitz, Peter Feather, Charles Hallahan, Ralph Heimlich, Laurian Unnevehr, and participants in seminars at IFPRI, the World Bank, Resources for the Future, U...

This paper reviews the need for a new land administration vision that takes a more integrated approach rather than the historic fragmented approach and examines change management of land administration and cadastral systems in the context of global drivers of change. This results in the development of a framework for re-engineering land administration systems. After discussing a land administra...

The practicalities of a modern land administration system require some means of boundary adjustment (or repair). Of the possible mechanisms it is concluded that an alternative to adverse possession, statutory encroachment, is preferable to part parcel adverse possession.