Farmland often contributes scenic quality and cultural heritage to a region; however, these factors are challenging to incorporate into standard farmland valuation schemes because of their qualitative nature. This research develops a method for enhancing the Land Evaluation and Site Assessment (LESA) model to incorporate scenic quality and cultural heritage elements into the rating scheme. Data...

Climate and land use changes are key drivers of current biodiversity trends, but interactions between these drivers are poorly modeled, even though they could amplify or mitigate negative impacts of climate change. Here, we attempt to predict the impacts of different agricultural change scenarios on common breeding birds within farmland included in the potential future climatic suitable areas f...

Soils play an important role in sequestrating atmospheric CO₂. Coastal tidal flats have been intensively reclaimed for food security and living spaces worldwide. We aimed to identify the changes of soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) following coastal reclamation and their spatial variation in the coastal area of mid-Eastern China to provide information for coastal cropland manage...

A trivariate vector autoregression time series process, based on a present-value land price model, is used to decompose Iowa farmland prices into fundamental and non-fundamental components. A recent study, by Falk and Lee (1998), found that non-fundamental shocks are an important source of volatility in farmland prices and it was interpreted that these price movements were due to fads not specu...

Farmland environmental deterioration is the main reason which results in the agricultural product quality problems, so it is necessary to build a geospatial information system for farmland environmental monitoring and management. The rapid development of portable farmland environmental surveying or sampling devices and sensor network have made this possible. In this paper, we describe the desig...

Food safety is a major concern for the Chinese public. This study collected 465 published papers on heavy metal pollution rates (the ratio of the samples exceeding the Grade II limits for Chinese soils, the Soil Environmental Quality Standard-1995) in farmland soil throughout China. The results showed that Cd had the highest pollution rate of 7.75%, followed by Hg, Cu, Ni and Zn, Pb and Cr had ...

Global environmental challenges require approaches that integrate biodiversity conservation, food production, and livelihoods at landscape scales. We reviewed the approach of conserving biodiversity on “high-nature-value” (HNV) farmland, covering 75 million ha in Europe, from a resilience perspective. Despite growing recognition in natural resource policies, many HNV farmlands have vanished, an...

This study examines the effects of land use and slope angle on runoff, soil loss and nitrogen loss from hillslopes of the Loess Plateau in China. Farmland, wasteland and four forest treatments (sea buckthornþ poplar, immature sea buckthorn, mature sea buckthorn, and immature Chinese pine) were the types of land use that were compared. The results showed that July was the critical period for run...

The protection of farmland from development is emerging as a major policy initiative in several states and dozens of counties and municipalities. From a national perspective, the loss of farmland-estimated at about one million acres a year-does not appear to be a threat to America's food supply or food prices. However, from a local and regional perspective, farmland loss to suburban and ex-urba...