Agriculture’s farmland assessment problem has caught the attention of the Indiana General Assembly. Senate Bill 436 passed the Senate and the House by wide margins. At this writing it is in conference committee. The bill postpones use of new soil productivity factors, and more significantly limits increases in the base rate for farmland assessment for taxes in 2016 and 2017. The bill asks that ...

China has encountered serious land loss problems along with urban expansion due to rapid urbanization. Without considering complicated spatiotemporal heterogeneity, previous studies could not extract urban transition rules at large scale well. This study proposed a random forest algorithm (RFA) based cellular automata (CA) model to simulate China's urban expansion and farmland loss in a fine sc...

Farmland conversion, i.e. conversion of farmland into non-agricultural construction land, is an unavoidable trend in global economic development(Fazal 2001; Tan et al. 2005; Bugri 2008). In China, which is relatively short of farmland resources and yet in the phase of accelerating urbanization, conversion of farmland is closely related to national food security, ecological security as well as s...

A series of soil conservation measures have been carried out to reduce soil loss on the Loess Plateau of China since 1950s, and the biologic measures were implemented according to topographic factors such as slope and elevation; therefore, the changes in topographic factors of land use can indicate the effects of the biologic measures. The objectives of this study were to (i) analyze the land u...

The glycoprotein known as glomalin-related soil protein (GRSP) is abundantly produced on the hyphae and spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in soil and roots. Few studies have focused on its amount, composition and associations with soil properties and possible land-use influences, although the data hints at soil rehabilitation. By choosing a primary forest soil as a non-degraded refer...

in agroforestry landscapes, land use, and the associated management practices exert strong impacts upon soil organic carbon stocks. data on the soil organic carbon were collected for different land-use types within a small watershed, el salado, located in lanjarón (se spain). eight land-use types namely: farmland planted in olive, almond, and cereals; forest with pinus halepensis mill. and pinu...

Abstract: The extraction of underground ore body inevitably causes a large amount of land subsidence. Current reclamation technologies in China mainly focus on stable subsided land. Therefore, a new technology for reclaiming unstable subsiding land is being studied for restoring farmland as much as possible based on a case study in Northern Anhui, China. In consideration of the mining plan, sub...

With economic growth and the improvement of the urbanization level, human activities have constantly interfered with landscape patterns, resulting in serious threats to regional ecological security. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the evolution and optimization of the landscape patterns. Based on three TM images from 1990, 2000, and 2010, and selected landscape pattern indexes, ...

Conceived to combat widescale biodiversity erosion in farmland, agri-environment schemes have largely failed to deliver their promises despite massive financial support. While several common species have shown to react positively to existing measures, rare species have continued to decline in most European countries. Of particular concern is the status of insectivorous farmland birds that forag...