Agricultural Land Markets - Efficiency and Regulation"

The dynamics of agricultural land markets in Germany have changed substantially over the past ten years, with both lease and purchase prices for farmland rising sharply. This price increase has had an impact on agricultural land use, leading, among other things, to an increase in the proportion of larger farms, larger parcels of land, and less heterogeneity in agricultural production. These structural changes in agriculture have also had a significant impact on environmental indicators both on agricultural land and in its surroundings, for example through changes in landscape structures and by influencing habitat composition. This subproject aims to generate a better understanding of how the observed changes in the agricultural land market affect agricultural cultivation structures, ownership patterns, farm sizes, field sizes, and bird biodiversity. Bird biodiversity is ideal for approximating the environmental impact of agriculture, as birds serve as proxy species for other taxa. In addition, consistent spatiotemporal data on bird biodiversity for the whole of Germany are available from citizen science projects. We will investigate the links between these variables using spatially and temporally explicit analyses, both retrospectively and prospectively. The data-driven approach uses spatial statistical analyses and machine learning methods to identify patterns and processes in two agriculturally important regions of Germany (Brandenburg and Lower Saxony) and in the Czech Republic. The retrospective results, together with stakeholder knowledge, will be used to develop future scenarios in order to predict alternative developments in land markets and assess their consequences for farm structures, land use, and bird biodiversity. The subproject, which lies at the interface between geography, agricultural economics, ecology, and geoinformation sciences, will provide the research group with detailed and comprehensive insights into the indirect effects of changes on land markets. This knowledge can provide valuable arguments for government intervention in land markets and also support their spatial planning. Such knowledge is important because the environmental impacts of ongoing agricultural structural change are of great social significance and therefore receive a lot of attention in science, politics, and the media.