RG 2569/1: Agricultural Land Markets – Efficiency and Regulation (SP 07)

Agricultural land markets in Germany have changed substantially in the last decade, with rapidly increasing land sales and land rental prices. As a result, the spatial configuration of agricultural land use has changed, with a trend towards a higher share of larger farms, larger plots, and towards lower heterogeneity of agricultural production. These structural changes in agricultural production arguably also impacted in environmental integrity in agriculturally used areas as well as in their surroundings by modifying landscape configurations and altering habitats. In this subproject, we aim to understand land market outcomes at farm level by examining associations between changes in land prices and changes in agricultural land use, ownership, farm and plot sizes, and link this to bird biodiversity as an environmental indicator. Birds are ideally suited to proxy environmental outcomes because they serve as surrogate species for other taxa and because consistent citizen science data for bird sightings are available across time and for entire Germany. We will analyse linkages between these variables with retrospective and prospective examinations that exploit spatially- and temporally-explicit data. Our data-driven approach will draw on spatial statistics and machine learning to extract patterns and associations for two agriculturally important federal states of Germany (Brandenburg and Lower Saxony) and for the Czech Republic. The retrospective insights together with stakeholder knowledge will serve to develop future scenarios that allow exploring alternative land market developments and regulations and anticipate their effects on farm structures, land use, and bird biodiversity. Our subproject, situated at the interface of geography, agricultural economics, ecology, and geoinformation science, will contribute detailed and area-wide spatiotemporal knowledge for the research unit regarding indirect land market outcomes that may justify regulatory land market interventions and assist in their spatial targeting. Such analyses are timely because the environmental impacts of the ongoing structural changes in agricultural production are of substantial interest for society at large and because they have received increasing attention in science, policy, and media.