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PDF
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Type:
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Conference Paper |
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Author:
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Kauneckis, Derek; Novac, Christina |
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Conference:
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Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium, the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property |
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Location:
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Bloomington, Indiana, USA |
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Conf. Date:
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May 31-June 4 |
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Date:
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2000 |
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URI:
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https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1685
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Sector:
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Land Tenure & Use |
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Region:
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North America |
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Subject(s):
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IASC
common pool resources
land tenure and use--models
land tenure and use
satellite image analysis
remote sensing
preference
environmental change--models
Workshop
CIPEC
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Abstract:
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"Models of land-cover change have typically examined the phenomena on a regional scale. These models are often empirical driven and at best infer the motives driving individual actors. Those models examining the decisions of individual actors assume purely economic motives, with land cover understood purely as a factor in production. This paper seeks to explain the micro-level processes at work in determining land cover change. It accepts that economic incentives and conditions are important, but that there may be important differences in the preferences of a population that explain the variation observed across a landscape. The analysis concerns landowners values and use of forest cover and how they interact interaction with the characteristics of individual private parcels to affect land cover. Using a multinomial logit, it examines the impact of parcel size, agricultural use, the length of ownership, existing rules affecting land use, the presence of a residence, as well as landowners valuation of forest resources on the change in forest cover on a parcel from 1972 to 1997. Of these variables, parcel size, agricultural use and length of ownership were all found to be significant at a 0.05 level. Landowner valuation of forest cover was weakly significant at a 0.13 level. Of the factors examined here, parcel size had the greatest effect on forest cover change. Surprisingly, smaller sized parcels (< 40 acres) had the highest probability of having experienced a net forest gain during the study period. As expected, parcels with a larger percent of area under agriculture had a higher probability of having experienced a net forest loss than did parcels with a smaller percent of area under agriculture. The most interesting result is the effect of individual landowners preferences. While they affect the likelihood that a parcel had experienced a change in forest cover in the past, they did not determine the direction of that change. It was equally likely for parcels with landowners expressing strong forest conservation values to have experienced net forest loss or gain. The results lead to interesting implications for a theory of the causes and impact of land cover change in industrial societies."
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