About 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon is stored in peat soils. Peatland’s functional principle of carbon storage greatly depends on management strategies. Therefore agricultural peatland use becomes a focal point of interest in the current debate on climate protection. Agricultural...

Agricultural landscapes are important elements of European culture. There is an increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes represent economic assets; not only because of the production of agricultural commodities, but also by offering significant opportunities for the socioeconomic...

Agricultural land use does not only concern farmers, but also has a large number of social and environmental effects. Consequently, it is to be assumed that farmers have to use financial resources as well as labour in order to provide these services. Using the nonparametric method of Data...

Using a significant amount of public funding, large-scale nature-conservation projects in Germany aim to secure and develop ecologically valuable areas and endangered habitats and species. Due to the substantial land-use changes accompanying these projects, their implementation can also have...

For applications in agricultural and environmental economics, complex ecological systems are often oversimplified to the extent that ecologists rarely consider model results valid. Recursive optimization of complex systems represents an alternative, but requires strong assumptions regarding time...

The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

Agricultural land use does not only concern farmers, but is of high relevance for the environment. Agri-environmental programmes aim to foster the environmental soundness of agricultural production. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of agri-environmental programmes on the economic...

For applications in agricultural economics, complex ecological systems are often oversimplified to the extent that ecologists rarely consider model results valid. Recursive optimization of complex systems represents an alternative, but requires strong assumptions regarding time preference and...

Especially in environmentally sensitive agricultural landscapes, agriculture cannot define its aims by itself - it has to account for a number of demands of different groups of society. For example, agriculture is expected to produce food and at the same time contribute to the protection of...