The Thünen agricultural atlas

Background and Objective

The German agricultural statistics on land use and live stocks is an important indicator to assess environmental impacts. The statistics are the basis to estimate trends and policy impacts in the Thünen-Modellverbund. The access at small-scale level, like at community level, is limited by data security issues and the renewal of regional borderlines or new classification of data collection characters make it difficult to compile comparisons for longer time periods. Consequently, it is challenging to derive a data set, which is coherent over time.To solve this challenge is the aim of the project Thünen agricultural atlas: we intend to create such a data set at community level from 1999 until present by using the Farm Structure Survey, agricultural statistics and geo-referenced land use data and fulfill all data security issues, which allows for making the data set publicly available. The results of the project are part of the work regarding geo-referenced data infrastructure at the Thünen-Institute and will be published in this context.

Approach

The following working steps are needed to create a consistent data set without restrictions:

• Getting permission of the federal states for the access to data at community level
• Analyzing the data at the Forschungsdatenzentrum (FDZ) at community level via cluster analysis to fulfill the data security issues
• Linking the following data sets using the Bayesian-estimation procedure: i) public agricultural statistics ii) unconditional data generated by the cluster analysis iii) geo-referenced (GIS) land use data of the German landscape model (DLM)
• Validating the results at the FDZ with the observed community data
• Publishing the data at the Thünen geo-referenced data infrastructure (GDI)
• Development of a visualization tool (www.agraratlas.de) to analyze the land use and live stock densities

Data and Methods

We use geographic and geo-referenced methods, linked to the tools if the data preparation for the model analysis, to harmonize breaks in structures and new classifications, to close data gaps, and to derive a data set which is consistent over time and regions.

Data sources
2010 until 2020 – district data of the Farm Structure Survey (FSS) of the statistical offices of the federal states and cluster estimations on basis of the research data centre (RDC), the FSS of the statistical offices of the federation and the federal states;
1999 until 2007 – district data and cluster estimators on basis of the RDC, the statistical offices of the federation and the federal states – AfiD-Panel Agrar;
1999 until 2020 Basis-DLM – Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG).

Preliminary Results

The results of the project are published at the web site www.agraratlas.de. The methodological approach and the validation results can be found in the publications listed below.