Virtual Land Research Articles

Digital twins and land management in South Korea

Use of digital twins is becoming a global trend according to Gartner, the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) and the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB). In line with this trend, South Korea has applied digital twins to land systems. To this end, a pilot project has been performed in Jeonju city. This study reviews digital twins and land conceptually and analyses the case in Jeonju. Conceptually, in terms of effective policy decision support, digital twins and land have shared characteristics, encompassing physical land, virtual land, and land-related data. The case of Jeonju city has been reviewed in terms of the relationship between digital twins and land. In the process of collection and renewal of data from physical land, systematic data-management systems and collaboration among related departments and/or persons in charge are important. In terms of processing for digitalization in the virtual space, sufficient budget and human resource management have been identified as important elements. As for analysis and simulation conducted in the virtual space, trust in the model of analysis and simulation needs to be developed through verification and job rotation in the civil service; without proper transfer of duties and responsibilities, this could be an obstacle. In the process of decision-making with regard to physical land, social issues that could be caused by digital technologies need to be carefully considered. Last but not least, legal and institutional support is required. In order to improve the case of Jeonju city, the establishment of a digital twin committee with appropriate authority under the mayor is recommended, because single departments tend to have difficulty in dealing with diverse issues.

Quantitative assessment of agricultural horizontal ecological compensation in China, from the perspective of virtual land and virtual water.

A stable and complete agricultural horizontal ecological compensation (AHEC) is an essential means of reconciling agricultural ecosystem protection and regional development and is also the key to the sustainable use of agricultural water and land resources. Unlike previous methods of studying agricultural ecological compensation (AEC), this study analysed the direction and amount of net transfer of agricultural land and water use along with inter-provincial trade. In conjunction with the value of ecosystem services embedded in agricultural land and water resources, this study calculated AHEC standards and estimated payments/reimbursements from each province. We found that agricultural land and water resources continued to flow from the underdeveloped inland provinces to the developed coastal provinces in 2017. In addition, the value of agricultural ecosystem in the central and coastal areas can be further enhanced by reducing the negative value of their cropland. Even though the ecological compensation standards for virtual agricultural water use (AWU) was much lower than the ecological compensation standards for virtual agricultural land use (ALU), the integrated AHEC in 31 provinces was more reasonable than considering only virtual ALU and virtual AWU. These findings are of great theoretical and application significance for the government to establish a systematic and feasible framework for inter-provincial AHEC and serve as a reference for other countries to conduct related research.

Foreign trade and virtual land resources: A case study of China's grain

This paper selects four grain crops of rice, wheat, soybean, and corn, analyzes their foreign trade from 2002 to 2020, and estimates the virtual land resource. The research results show that China's grain has always been in the state of net import. China mainly exports rice and imports soybeans, and the market structure has an obvious trend of simplification. The net import of virtual land resources in China's grain has grown significantly and has outstanding contribution ability. The average annual net import is 62.25 million ha, which is almost equivalent to the arable land area of China's one-cropping area. The net import contribution of soybean virtual land resources is about 101 times of its sown area, while corn, rice, and wheat account for about 10.42, 11.69, and 74.66% of its sown area. The net importers of virtual land resources are relatively concentrated, mainly in Brazil, the US, Argentina, Ukraine, and Canada.

Spatiotemporal heterogeneities in water and land appropriations related to food losses and waste in China

Fast-growing food losses and waste (FLW) have caused major environmental issues, yet little is known about the role of trade in the inefficient resource consumption related to FLW. In this study, we estimated the inter-annual water footprints (WFs) and land footprints (LFs) related to FLW in consideration of associated inter-provincial virtual water (VW) and virtual land (VL) flows within China from 2000 to 2017. Additionally, differences between eating at home and out in rural and urban regions were distinguished. The FLW-related WF and LF showed 1.5- and 1.2-fold increasing trends, respectively, over the study period. Eating at home in rural regions caused the most FLW and associated water and land appropriations. Both FLW-related gross inter-provincial VW and VL flows increased by 99% and 22% during the study period, respectively, and inter-provincial VW and VL flows in corresponding FLW-related WF and LF differed significantly. In addition, food losses were found to cause more inefficient resource consumption than food waste. This analysis shows that the substantial role of FLW in shaping the intra-national food-related VW and VL networks, and that the policies for FLW diminution at the food supply chain stage are as important as those at the consumption stage.

Uncovering the patterns and driving forces of virtual forestland flows in China

Nowadays, virtual land use related to consumption and trade flows has become an important part of land use. However, there has been little discussion about virtual forestland use. Therefore, this study performs the multi-regional input-output model on virtual forestland use and its changes in thirty provinces in China. And the influencing factors behind the dynamics of virtual forestland have been explored through the structural decomposition analysis. The results show that the area of virtual forestland embodied in trade was 673,277 km2 and 566,791 km2 in 2007 and 2012, equivalent to 32.14% and 27.03% of the total forestland area in China, respectively. There was north to east coast virtual forestland trade mode in China. The developed provinces or cities in China such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Guangdong have a disproportionate share of virtual forestland imports (over 90%) from least developed provinces and forest-rich provinces. In addition, 11.06% and 7.47% of China's total forestland in 2007 and 2012 was used to supply consumption of foreign countries and regions. In addition, forestland use intensity and consumption volume were the main reasons for the dynamic changes of virtual forestland in most provinces. Through the exploration of the virtual forestland flow pattern helps to develop forestland conservation and restoration policies from the consumer side and achieve sustainable development of China's forest land.

Learning Effectivess of Virtual Land Surveying Simulator for Blended Open Distance Learning Amid Covid-19 Pandemic

Learning Effectivess of Virtual Land Surveying Simulator for Blended Open Distance Learning Amid Covid-19 Pandemic

Detection of Hate Speech and Offensive Language in Twitter Using Sentiment Analysis

Abstract: The dramatic development of online media, for example, Twitter and local area gatherings has upset correspondence and content distributing, but at the same time is progressively misused for the spread of disdain discourse and the association of disdain based exercises. The secrecy and portability managed by such media has made the rearing and spread of disdain discourse – in the long run prompting disdain wrongdoing – easy in a virtual land scape past the domains of conventional law requirement. Existing techniques in the identification of disdain discourse principally cast the issue as a regulated report grouping task [33]. These can be partitioned into two classifications: one depends on manual element designing that are then devoured by calculations, for example, SVM, Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression [3, 9, 11, 15, 19, 23, 35–39] (exemplary techniques); the other addresses the later profound learning worldview that utilizes neural organizations to consequently learn multi-facets of dynamic highlights from crude information [13, 26, 30, 34] (profound learning strategies). In this technique We show that it is a significantly more testing task, as our examination of the language in the commonplace datasets shows that disdain discourse needs interesting, discriminative highlights and hence is found in the 'long tail' in a dataset that is hard to find. We then, at that point propose Deep Neural Network structures filling in as highlight extractors that are especially powerful for catching the semantics of disdain discourse. Our techniques are assessed on the biggest assortment of disdain discourse datasets dependent on Twitter, and are demonstrated to have the option to beat best in class by up to 6 rate focuses in large scale normal F1, or 9 rate focuses in the seriously difficult instance of recognizing derisive substance. As an intermediary to evaluate and think about the semantic attributes of disdain and non-disdain Tweets, we additionally propose to contemplate the 'uniqueness' of the jargon for each class. Keywords: Classic Methods; DNN; Detection of hate speech and offensive language in Twitter; Sentimental Analysis

Dynamic Evolution and Spatial Convergence of the Virtual Cultivated Land Flow Intensity in China.

Exploring the flow intensity of virtual cultivated land is the key to improving the ecological compensation and food security policy. This study aimed to analyze the dynamic evolution, spatial convergence, and its affecting factors of the virtual cultivated land flow intensity. The spatial convergence model was used in this study. The results showed that, during 2000–2018, the growth rate of the surplus state of virtual cultivated land at the national level is less than that of the deficit state of virtual cultivated land in China. Moreover, the number of deficit provinces of virtual cultivated land flow intensity is increasing. The absolute β-convergence characteristics of the virtual cultivated land flow intensity are significant at the national, northeast, central, and western regions. Additionally, the conditional β-convergence exists at the national and four regional levels. Meanwhile, cultivated land resource endowment, population scale, regional economic development level, and agricultural mechanization level play an important role in the convergence process of inter-regional virtual cultivated land flow intensity. However, the influence degree of different control variables on different regional virtual cultivated land flow intensity is not consistent. Therefore, policymakers should pay attention to cultivated land resources’ spatial transfer mechanism when making regional cultivated land ecological compensation policies to coordinate the interesting relationship between the deficit area and surplus area of virtual cultivated land. Therefore, it is necessary to take the virtual cultivated land flow intensity as the reference index and use the combination of market guidance and government control to stimulus the stakeholders to protect cultivated land by taking different measures.

How Does China’s Economic Policy Uncertainty Affect the Sustainability of Its Net Grain Imports?

China is a considerable grain importer in the world. However, the sustainability of China’s grain imports has been greatly challenged by its increasing economic policy uncertainty (EPU).This paper constructs the indicators of economic and environmental sustainability of China’s net grain imports and analyzes the impact of its EPU index on these indicators with a Time-Varying Parameter Stochastic Volatility Vector Autoregression (TVP-SV-VAR) model to explore how China’s EPU affects the sustainability of its net grain imports. The main conclusions are as follows.(1) The sustainability of China’s net grain imports fluctuated from 2001 to 2019. (2) China’s EPU has a negative impact on the economic sustainability of its net grain imports. A higher EPU index leads to a lower net import potential ratio and higher trade cost. (3) China’s EPU has a significant negative impact on the environmental sustainability of its net grain imports. It has the greatest negative impact on virtual water imports and smaller impact on virtual land imports and embodied carbon emission. Therefore, China’s EPU affects the sustainability of its net grain imports negatively through its impact on its net grain import potential ratio, trade cost, and virtual land, virtual water, and embodied carbon emissions in net grain imports.

The Land-Water-Food-Environment nexus in the context of China's soybean import

Soybean import accounts for 90% of China's total domestic soybean supply. Such import has a substantial impact on how the country's resources are used as well as on its environment. In this study, we performed a national-scale assessment of the impact of soybean import on domestic cropland conversion, crop production, water use and nitrogen (N) fertilizer application. Results show that soybean production in China decreased by 26% (4.46 million tons) and sown areas were reduced by 25% (2.39 million ha) from the peak of 2004 to 2016. Of the areas taken out of the soybean production, 70% were converted to maize, 20% to rice, 3% to vegetables and 7% to fruits during this period. As a result of the cropland conversion, the production of maize, rice, vegetables and fruits increased by 10.42, 3.34, 2.49 and 3.26 million tons respectively. However, irrigation water use in the areas that were converted to the cultivation of the four types of crops increased by 96.42% (3.05 km3), with much of it coming from northern provinces where water is generally scarce. The application of N fertilizer increased by 256.65 thousand tons (almost 5 times) on the converted areas, partly due to the loss of the N-fixing soybean cultivation. Although a large quantity of virtual water and land were imported through soybean trade, the water use and N application were increased in reality. The analysis of the land-water-food-environment nexus in the context of soybean import provides comprehensive and useful information about the benefits and trade-offs associated with China's international soybean trade.

China’s forest land use change in the globalized world economy: Foreign trade and unequal household consumption

Considering the globalization of forest land use and the influence of China’s socio-economic process on forest resources, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of China’s forest land use change in the globalized world economy during 2000–2011, by means of embodiment accounting based on EXIOBASE3 database. External demand, primarily from USA, EU, Japan and rest of Asia-Pacific, accounts for 20−45% of China’s direct forest land use, meanwhile, increasing forest land use (50−60%) is displaced abroad, mainly to Russia (20−30%), America, Africa and rest of Asia-Pacific. Overall, China is a net importer of virtual forest land use due to large imports through forest products (e.g., wood, paper and pulp), while highly-processed non-forest products also contribute a dominant and increasing share in total exports. Consequently, in the trade with USA, Japan and many European countries, China is the net exporter of virtual forest land use, though it is the net importer of forest products as revealed by conventional monetary trade accounting, highlighting the necessity of the inclusive embodiment accounting to trace land use to actual final products. Regarding final consumption, virtual forest land use of rural households only reaches 65–75% that of urban households, due to large disparities in the consumption of non-forest products. Per capita virtual forest land use of the rural and urban poorest groups are only 1/5 and 1/6 of the nation’s richest group, respectively. Therefore, transnational cooperation is required to promote sustainable forest management worldwide. China should also prepare for growing demand for forest land and reduce associated environmental inequality in the process of urbanization and poverty alleviation.

The Economics of Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds: A Hedonic Regression Model for Virtual Land

Virtual worlds have become increasingly more important, and are being used for a large variety of recreational and business activities. Various companies have opened virtual offices and brand ambassador spaces, and the recent surge in online interactions has further increased the interest in these social platforms. In this paper, we analyze the first large-scale virtual world that has been built on a public blockchain network. We compile a comprehensive data set that allows us to study the economics of blockchain-based virtual property. We then use this data set to estimate hedonic regression models for virtual land and employ a semi-parametric Mixed Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) model that allows for spatially flexible coefficients. In particular, we expect the central business district (CBD) gradient and the street distance coefficients to vary across the virtual world. Conversely, we consider the coefficients of binary variables to be more meaningful in a global context. For inference purposes, we employ spatial robust heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) standard errors. We find evidence that prices of virtual land parcels are primarily driven by factors that are of particular importance in business applications. Land parcels in close proximity to popular landmarks, such as the city center, main streets, plazas and commercially-driven districts, as well as parcels with easily memorable address-like features were claimed at substantially higher prices. We used different model specifications and conducted various robustness checks, including a separate estimation for price segments and investor-specific effects. All specifications have led to similar results and support the evidence from our MGWR model.

Estimating virtual land use under future conditions: Application of a food balance approach using the UK

Virtual land use refers to the area of land used to produce a unit food commodity that is traded. The role of virtual land use in future food security under conditions of land scarcity has received little policy and research attention, partly due to the constraints of complex modeling and data requirements. This study demonstrates a simple food balance approach to estimate virtual land use under projected population, climate, and land use change using the United Kingdom (UK) and feed barley in the 2050s. In this approach, future supply (production based on climate and land use change scenarios) was distributed over utilization components based on proportions derived from baseline food balance sheet. Subsequently, future surplus or deficit was estimated as the difference between supply and projected demand (a product of per capita demand and population). Based on the commodity balance (surplus or deficit), virtual land use was estimated for different combinations of population, climate change and land use scenarios. The results showed that, even at 90th percentile yield, the minimum and maximum area of land required in addition to the current area of land under barley cultivation to meet projected demand in the UK, for all combinations of population, climate and land use change, were 306 and 840 thousand ha. However, due to reductions in projected area of land, virtual land use imports ranged from 315 to 1450 thousand ha for all combinations of population, climate, and land use change. The UK’s contribution to global land losses due to productivity differences between the UK and partner countries were between 9–577 thousand ha. It is concluded that the food balance approach applied in this paper is simple and replicable in data-poor contexts to provide comparable estimates of future virtual land use transfers, bearing in mind the limitation imposed by the assumption of time invariance of the proportionate distribution of utilization components. Further, the UK example highlights the need to examine the impacts of national policies of countries that currently have high productivity for some globally important crops on future virtual land use and efficient use of dwindling global land resources.

Drivers and trade-offs of multiple environmental stressors from global rice

Rice is a staple food supplying a large share of calories in so many countries and requiring a large amount of land and water. Rice is also a substantial source of methane (CH 4 ) emissions. In this paper, water and land use, and CH 4 emissions from rice in 167 countries during the period2000-2016 are estimated.A Physical Trade Analysis based on a Material Flow Analysis is developed to estimate the virtual water, land and emissions linked to international rice trade and to final consumption. Globally, while water and land use, and CH 4 emissions from rice slightly grew from 2000 to 2016 (7-8%), a substantial improvement of the production efficiency resulted in saving of 187 Gm 3 of green water, 82 Gm 3 of blue water, 40 Mha of land and 31 ktonnes of CH 4 emissions (2000-2016). It implies that the main driver is the volume of rice produced. Domestic consumption covered the largest share (94%) whereas international trade had low significance (6%). However, for some Asiatic and African countries the trade contribution was relevant.The multiple assessment developed in this study allows the parallel evaluation of three environmental stressors revealing potential drivers and trade-offs among them. In particular, we find that when improving the yield by 0.5 tonnes/ha, a global reduction of about 10% for each stressor is recorded. The approach used in this paper constitutes a more advanced information for policymakersand an innovative tool upon which environmental policies may be based.

Inequality and collaboration in north China urban agglomeration: Evidence from embodied cultivated land in Jing-Jin-Ji's interregional trade

An urban agglomeration is a highly connected city group, which is nested in complex trading networks. Ignoring the intercity connections and regional inequality may lead to the unsustainability of the urban agglomeration. The misuse and overuse of cultivated land resources are threatening environmental sustainability and causing global climate change. Facing the inequality and environment pressures in the urban agglomeration, the cultivated land resource reallocation within the complex urban agglomeration trading network should be systematically explored. This study analyzes the virtual cultivated land flows of the Jing-Jin-Ji (JJJ) region embodied in China's interregional trade network using a multiregional input-output model. Results show that the average virtual cultivated land intensity of the JJJ region is 1.59 ha/million yuan, which is below the national average. The JJJ region has 10.74 million ha of embodied cultivated land in consumption, accounting for 7.82% of the country's total amount. JJJ region is an import-oriented region and it receives virtual cultivated land from surrounding underdeveloped regions, such as Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia. Beijing and Tianjin are typical net importers of virtual cultivated land, while Zhangjiakou, Xingtai, Hengshui, Baoding, and Cangzhou are net exporters in the interior of the JJJ region. This study could provide a systematical perspective and data supporting system for formulating the sustainable cultivated land use policies and collaborated development policies in the JJJ region to mitigate regional inequality. Policy suggestions concerning the eco-compensation mechanism, collaborative innovation mode, and uniform management platform in JJJ are given.

A political–economic explanation of “internet space”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to define the Internet as a virtual space supported by technologies and presented in the form of socioeconomic relations from the perspective of political economy. The Internet space is a unique virtual commodity different from ordinary commodities and has the following effect characteristics: super replicability, space- and time-transcendence, open-source shareability and reality–virtuality transformation.Design/methodology/approachInternet space can also be imagined as a piece of virtual land. Internet space can be deemed as a piece of virtual land and its value can be divided into labor value and virtual value. The pricing model of virtual value is mainly determined by the gain and discount rate and this value comes from the transfer and markup of social value. In the context of the Internet Plus era, Internet space has become an essential economic factor that influences human economic activities.FindingsTherefore, it is of practical significance and theoretical value to introduce Internet space as an economic variable into the framework of economic theory. The realistic logic of Internet space is to influence human economic behaviors with the combination of information binding.Originality/valueThe theoretical mechanism is to have an impact on the micro-market price by changing market relations from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Its path to functioning at the macro level is to influence economic behaviors by changing the expectations of investment and consumption, resulting in new economic trends.

Modelling the effects of energy taxes on ecological footprint transfers in China's foreign trade

Significant inter-country transfers of ecological footprint are embodied in foreign trade. Previous research on these transfers mainly focused on historical characteristics of the flows based on historical data. However, the transfers of ecological footprints in foreign trade are dynamic and are influenced by environmental tax policies, whose future impacts have seldom been considered. In the present study, we explored the effects of an energy tax, a common form of environmental tax, on these transfers. We combined a multi-sector dynamic computable general equilibrium model with ecological footprint assessment, and analyzed the changes in the actual and virtual land uses that comprise the ecological footprint under different tax intensities. We used China as a case study to analyze the energy tax's effects. For the actual land use component of the ecological footprint, the energy tax increased the export of ecological footprint but decreased its import, and China's average net exports (exports minus imports) decreased by 4.56 × 106 gha (global hectares) and 10.81 × 106 gha from 2015 to 2020 under the low and high tax intensities, respectively. For the virtual land use component of the ecological footprint, the energy tax simultaneously decreased export and import of this footprint component; the average net import would increase by 3.84 × 106 gha and 8.91 × 106 gha. For the total ecological footprint, the energy tax also simultaneously reduced export and import, with the net import decreasing by 1.76 × 106 gha and 4.45 × 106 gha under the low and high taxes, respectively.

Moving beyond text, embracing the visual: the Virtual Land Law Field Trip Project @ Sussex

ABSTRACT Set against the pedagogic literature outlining the benefits of the “visual” in instruction, this article charts the conceptualisation, development and impact of the Virtual Land Law Field Trip Project @ Sussex. Drawing on the findings from a student survey and focus group evaluation, the article outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the project. Notwithstanding limitations, and indeed the inherent challenges and obstacles to incorporating “innovative” approaches in teaching, the article concludes by strongly advocating a greater commitment to moving beyond the dominance of text in legal education and embracing the visual where possible. Utilising more dynamic visual representations such as video enhances instruction, supports cognitive memory and is an excellent way to provide meaningful practical insight examples. Moreover, embracing visual representations offers an alternative space within which to include counter voices and narratives to challenge the curriculums we teach.

Tension of Agricultural Land and Water Use in China's Trade: Tele-Connections, Hidden Drivers and Potential Solutions.

Interregional trade can potentially extend the management of scarce resources beyond a region's territory along supply chains. Here we combined the multiregional input-output model with structural decomposition analysis to reveal the distant connections of agricultural land and water use as well as the drivers behind their variations in China. Our results show that trade-embodied agricultural land use increase by 2.3-fold and 2.5-fold for virtual agricultural water use flows from 2002 to 2012. The water-starved northern China with abundant agricultural land is the main exporter of virtual (also called trade-embodied) agricultural land and water. Moreover, the role of the virtual water use importers and exporters were determined by the availability of land, rather than water resources. Based on scenario analysis, we found that if agricultural water use efficiency of north China reached the world's top-level but agricultural land use efficiency remained unchanged, the virtual water flows would be reduced by 32% and only water resources, not agricultural land, would be able to sustain future economic development. Our findings may provide significant information for potential solutions to China's regional water shortage from a land-water nexus perspective.

Spatial-spectral hyperspectral image classification based on information measurement and CNN

In order to construct virtual land environment for virtual test, we propose a construction method of virtual land environment using multi-satellite remote sensing data, the key step of which is accurate recognition of ground object. In this paper, a method of ground object recognition based on hyperspectral image (HSI) was proposed, i.e., a HSI classification method based on information measure and convolutional neural networks (CNN) combined with spatial-spectral information. Firstly, the most important three spectra of the hyperspectral image was selected based on information measure. Specifically, the entropy and color-matching functions were applied to determine the candidate spectra sets from all the spectra of the hyperspectral image. Then three spectra with the largest amount of information were selected through the minimum mutual information. Through the above two steps, the dimensionality reduction for hyperspectral images was effectively achieved. Based on the three selected spectra, the CNN network input combined with the spatial-spectral information was designed. Two input strategies were designed: (1) The patch surrounding the pixel to be classified was directly intercepted from the grayscale images of the three selected spectra. (2) In order to highlight the effect of the spectrum of the pixel to be classified, all the spectral components of this pixel were superimposed on the patch obtained by the previous strategy. As a result, a new patch with more prominent spectral components of the pixel to be classified was obtained. Using the two public hyperspectral datasets, Salinas and Pavia Center, the experiments of on both parameter selection and classification performance were performed to verify that the proposed methods had better classification performance.