Aim To test six hypotheses that could explain or mediate the positive correlation between human population density (HPD) and bird species richness while controlling for biased sampling effort. These hypotheses were labelled as follows: productivity (net primary productivity, NPP); inherent heterogeneity (diversity of vegetation types); anthropogenic heterogeneity (diversity of land uses); conse...

Previous studies of tenancy and land reform programs suggest that these programs substantially increased agricultural productivity. However, these studies are limited to sharecropping environments. This paper investigates the productivity effect of the 1953 land ownership transfer program in Taiwan, where fixed-rental contracts predominated. This program transferred 27% of the paddy land to inc...

Recent land reforms in China have sought to address fundamental problems with the Household Production Responsibility System such as land fragmentation. Primarily the reforms have targeted land productivity and grain output. However, the reforms have had a much broader effect on rural development as they have allowed a degree of household specialisation in non-grain activities both on and off t...

Regional ecosystems have been greatly affected by the rapid expansion of urban areas. In order to explore the impact of land use change on net primary productivity (NPP) in rapidly developing cities during the current urbanization process, we quantified land use change in Liaoning province between 2000 and 2010 using net primary productivity as an indicator of ecosystem productivity and health....

Abslraci-This article focuses on developing a predictive method to simulate the distribution of agricultural land use patterns based on remote sensing and a multiple choice logit model. A multiple choice model is developed to determine land use options such as rice cropland, maize cropland, wheat cropland, soybean cropland and so on. The independent variables are grouped under two categories: b...

This article investigates the effects of wheat genetic diversity and land degradation on risk and agricultural productivity in less favoured production environments of a developing agricultural economy. Drawing production data from household and plot surveys conducted in the highlands of Ethiopia, we estimate a stochastic production function to evaluate the effects of variety richness, land deg...

We propose a procedure to obtain a general estimate of the rate at which agricultural productivity declines on newly cleared land in the Brazilian Amazon. This estimated parameter has two advantages over conventional estimates. First, it is a general, average estimate that can be used in macro-scale economic analysis. Second, the estimate is derived from regional data accessible to economists r...

PREMISE OF STUDY Plant functional traits are commonly used as proxies for plant responses to environmental challenges, yet few studies have explored how functional trait distributions differ across gradients of land-use change. By comparing trait distributions in intact forests with those across land-use change gradients, we can improve our understanding of the ways land-use change alters the d...

The global land system is under intense pressure from human demands for a range of different services. Economic theory suggests that globalised free trade is the most efficient way of handling these demands, allowing maximum productivity and specialisation of supply. However, political responses are often protectionist in nature, designed to ensure continuity of land uses and the regional produ...

During the 1960s and 1970s there was an intense debate on the observed inverse relationship between farm size and per hectare agricultural productivity in India. It was subsequently argued that the higher productivity of smallholdings would disappear with the adoption of superior technology, modernisation and growth in general. However, close to half a century later, National Sample Survey data...