Agricultural land use does not only produce agricultural goods, it also creates landscapes. Primarily, agricultural land use caused an increase in biodiversity due to a variety of heterogeneous landscapes. But this positive effect turned back with the beginning of modern agricultural cultivation. Thus, intensive land use features rather negative consequences for biotic and abiotic resources. Furthermore, it is expected that the contemporaneous marginalisation causes a decrease in habitats and in biodiversity. In recent years, another trend in land use is the growing cultivation of bioenergy plants.Agricultural land use has always been dynamic and is expected to experience ongoing changes in the coming decades. Thus, a thorough understanding of past and recent land-use dynamics is essential in order to understand how agricultural land use might develop in the future, which consequently generates the basis for future management processes.Given this background, the present thesis analysed the regional differences of agricultural land use and land-use change. As described in two separate papers, this thesis aims at (i) developing a classification method to detect spatial and temporal differences of the patterns of agricultural land use (Chapter 2), and (ii) examining the area changes of permanent grassland and maize as well as analysing if there is a relationship of biogas plants and, for comparison, livestock farming to the changes in agricultural land use (Chapter 3). The main data set were data of the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) containing information on agricultural land use for the years 2005 to 2010. The study region was the federal state Hesse which was chosen due to its both marginal and intensively used agricultural landscapes.The results of the first substudy (Chapter 2) revealed that changes in land use are obvious at the spatial level of sub-regions. With the help of k-means cluster analyses, five types of agricultural land use patterns and dynamics (TLPDs) were detected which represent the different sub-regions. The TLPDs were characterised by physical landscape attributes (elevation, slope, temperature and precipitation) as well as by the intensity of livestock farming (expressed by livestock data, i.e. cattle and pig number, and livestock density index). In Hesse, the general trends of intensification and marginalisation were evident. The first two TLPDs A and B, which are the arable land type and the maize type, represent sub-regions with favourable physical conditions and therefore an intensive land use. They are dominated by arable land, in return the proportion of grassland is low. TLPD B additionally features a high proportion of maize area. The next sub-region, TLPD C, represents an intermediate type which means that the investigated variables of land use are at an average compared to the other sub-regions. In sub-regions of both TLPD D and E, the grassland type and the grassland-maize type, physical conditions are unfavourable for agricultural cultivation. Thus, these sub-regions belong to the marginal landscapes. Grassland is the predominant land use, and, consequently, the proportions of arable land are low. Surprisingly, these sub-regions feature a land-use change in favour of maize on arable land.The analyses of the second substudy (Chapter 3) detected in a first step the area changes of permanent grassland and maize, both at the spatial level of Hesse as a whole and at the level of its 430 municipalities. In Hesse, permanent grassland has decreased, especially since 2007 this decrease is continuous. It primarily gets lost in the highly productive regions with intensive agricultural cultivation. In contrast, the maize area increased significantly. However, since the percentage of maize area differs considerably, its relevance for land-use change depends on the sub-region. Furthermore, the results of the second substudy also proved that there are statistically significant correlations between the existence of biogas plants to the exemplarily analysed variables of agricultural land use, i.e. maize area in 2010, expansion of maize area from 2005 to 2010, and conversion of grassland 2005 to arable land 2010. The relationships between maize area and its expansion as well as the conversion of permanent grassland to biogas plants were significant but only in some sub-regions and at a rather low level. In summary, biogas plants are drivers of land-use change but depending on the sub-region.The underlying data set of this thesis, which are IACS data, proved to be most useful in analysing changes of agricultural land use. Since these data are collected annually and at field level, information on land use is at a highly disaggregated level.
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