Patterns and drivers of recent agricultural land-use change in Southern Germany

Markus A Meyer,Andrea Früh-Müller

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104959

Abstract

Traditionally, agricultural land-use change (LUC) analyses focus on the conversion of natural land to agriculture especially in developing countries. Studies considering recent agricultural LUC (e.g., to built-up land) for the last two decades in more stable agricultural systems in Western Europe are mostly missing for the regional scale. Major LUC pathways, their drivers and potential counteracting factors such as subsidies or an increasing demand for regional agricultural products should be analyzed.Using the Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg in Germany, we quantified (i) major pathways of agricultural LUC with a transition matrix, and (ii) spatial patterns of agricultural LUC with optimized hot-spot analyses. (iii) We used boosted regression trees (BRT) to identify factors which foster agricultural LUC towards settlement and forest as well as semi-natural open land. Results for the last 15 years showed a considerable decline of agricultural land due to afforestation (3.1%) and due to settlement and infrastructure development (2.7%), which were the main LUC pathways. Both settlement development and afforestation concentrated at existing hotspots of urban development and in forest-dominated areas. Settlement-driven agricultural LUC was largely dependent on population density and development and independent from agricultural or biophysical parameters. Forest-driven LUC was mostly explained by agricultural parameters (i.e., low land rents and biophysical factors such as high slopes). Governance instruments such as regional planning and payments for maintaining agriculture on marginal land did not seem to maintain a balanced spatial distribution of agricultural land. If not improved, settlement development will considerably outcompete agriculture in prosperous sub-regions. Economic constraints will force farmers to abandon agriculture for forest on marginal locations at the cost of an intact cultural landscape.

Highlights

Land-use change (LUC) requires attention due to its major con sequences for the environment and human well-being (Plieninger et al, 2016)
We focused on agricultural LUC and identified hot and cold spots for two major pathways from agricultural land to (i) built-up and (ii) to forest and semi-natural open land
The Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg is a typical examples for a region with polarized landscape dynamics but comparable institutional and environmental conditions as, e.g., the abandonment of crop- and grassland occurs at one location and the intensification at another location

Summary

Introduction

Land-use change (LUC) requires attention due to its major con sequences for the environment and human well-being (Plieninger et al, 2016). Quantifying LUC often provides the basis to assess non-monetary impacts (e.g., on ecosystem services such as landscape quality by Schulp et al, 2019). The quantified impacts of LUC facilitate balancing the cost and benefits of LUC (e.g., cultural and regulating ecosystem services vs benefits arising from urbanization or agricultural intensification (Plieninger et al, 2016) as main drivers of LUC). Meta studies on drivers of LUC emphasize on forests most and consider agriculture less (van Vliet et al, 2016). In Europe and North America, Li and Li (2017) identify considerable farmland abandonment, i.e., a decline of agricultural land. In North America, agricultural land has rather continuously declined. Other studies for the US show that cropland in the US has been overall rather constant since the 1950s, whereas a decline of cropland was identified at the east coast and an increase at the west coast (Ramankutty et al, 2010)

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Discussion

Conclusion