Soil quality is used to assess the soil’s ability to maintain ecological and environmental quality as well as agricultural productivity. A unique indicator associated with land use pressure is agricultural land value. Because land value is assessed at a property scale and regularly updated, we considered land value to be a good proxy for agricultural intensification. We therefore tested whether a relationship exists between land value per hectare, point-scale soil quality, other land pressure indicators (stock numbers, dominant land use), and catchment characteristics, as this has not been tested previously. We used soil quality from a national soil quality monitoring dataset, and land pressure indicators across 192 catchments (31% of land area) in New Zealand. We tested an array of models with the random forest model exhibiting the best goodness-of-fit metrics. The most important explanatory variable in predicting land valuation per hectare in the random forest model was catchment elevation (mean decrease in the mean square error; 0.92), followed by catchment potential evapotranspiration (0.78). Similarly, the fraction of dairy (0.28) and arable (0.27) land use had a relatively important effect, as did soil pH (0.32), the C:N ratio (0.31), and carbon concentration (0.30). We conclude that that land value per hectare has a well-defined relationship with land use and some soil quality measures, though expressing soil quality data at a catchment scale presented some challenges. Although the relationship was complicated, this study indicates that further work to determine if land value could act as an integrating proxy for land intensification is warranted.

中文翻译：

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将土地价值与土壤质量和土地利用压力指标联系起来


土壤质量用于评估土壤维持生态和环境质量以及农业生产力的能力。与土地利用压力相关的一个独特指标是农业用地价值。由于土地价值是在财产规模上评估并定期更新的，因此我们认为土地价值是农业集约化的良好代表。因此，我们测试了每公顷土地价值、点尺度土壤质量、其他土地压力指标（种群数量、主要土地利用）和集水区特征之间是否存在关系，因为以前没有测试过。我们使用了来自国家土壤质量监测数据集的土壤质量，以及新西兰 192 个集水区（占土地面积的 31%）的土地压力指标。我们使用随机森林模型测试了一系列模型，这些模型表现出最佳的拟合优度指标。在随机森林模型中，预测每公顷土地估价的最重要解释变量是流域高程（均方误差的平均减少量;0.92），其次是流域潜力蒸散量（0.78）。同样，乳制品比例 （0.28） 和耕地利用比例 （0.27） 具有相对重要的影响，土壤 pH 值 （0.32）、C：N 比 （0.31） 和碳浓度 （0.30） 也是如此。我们得出的结论是，每公顷的土地价值与土地利用和一些土壤质量指标有着明确的关系，尽管在集水区规模上表示土壤质量数据存在一些挑战。尽管这种关系很复杂，但这项研究表明，有必要进一步努力确定土地价值是否可以作为土地集约化的综合代理。