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

• Published in: Land use policy 2020-12, Vol.99, p.104959, Article 104959
• Main Authors: Meyer, Markus A., Früh-Müller, Andrea
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Afforestation; Agricultural development; Agricultural economics; Agricultural land; Agricultural products; Agriculture; Developing countries; Farmers; Forest management; Forests; Land; Land use; LDCs; Metropolitan areas; Parameters; Population density; Regional planning; Regression analysis; Rents; Spatial analysis; Spatial distribution; Subsidies; Urban development
• ISSN: 0264-8377; 1873-5754
• DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104959

•Agricultural land mostly declined due to afforestation, followed by urbanization.•Both afforestation und urbanization clustered at existing hotspots of both land uses.•Agricultural land-use change due to urbanization was mostly independent from agricultural factors.•It was dependent on socio-demographic factors (e.g., population density and development).•Forest-driven agricultural land-use change mostly depended on agriculturally relevant factors (e.g., land rent and slope). 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.