Since the unregulated legal status of land results in the violation of its legal and economic security, intensified land marginalization, a decrease in local government income caused by tax revenue ...loss and hinders effective real estate management and trade, national governments try to regulate legal rights to real estate. This paper presents an analysis of common land (acr. CL). This form of management combines the features of real estate whose legal regulation is unclear, which is located between the private and public (state/commune) ownership and the common law associated with the possibility of using or gaining interest. This study aims to examine the extent of common lands in Europe, to analyse the possibility of regulating the legal status of common lands and to demonstrate the effects resulting from the possibility of free law interpretation. An interdisciplinary concept was employed, combining the historical approach based on archival sources and the quantitative-qualitative approach based on descriptive, normative, and statistical information. This made it possible to estimate and compare feasible solutions that take into account the size (and market value) of a share in common lands. These methods were applied in the case of a medium-size common land situated in the Mazowieckie Voivodship (Poland). The findings quantitatively showed the scale of the freedom with which legal regulations can be interpreted, which can be up to 100% of the share. This research problem is of particular importance to users of CL situated near urban areas.
•Common land (CL) combines the features of real estate between the private and public property and the common law of land use.•The unregulated legal status of common land (CL) violates the legal and economic security of a real estate.•Freedom of law interpretation with respect of CL privatization leads to land-related conflicts.•The division model should take into account the CL character and location.
The peat fen was viewed by landscape improvers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as under-utilised land in need of improvement. Two contrasting areas of common peat fen in Lincolnshire are ...examined to test this contention. It is shown that by the twelfth and early thirteenth century these fens were closely managed. To prevent flooding the adjoining rivers the watercourses were canalised. Drainage channels were cut through the fen to remove water and embankments were constructed to constrain the rivers. Some permanent settlements were established by monasteries in the twelfth century to use the rich pasture for cattle grazing. Other areas were enclosed for meadowland. Instead of considering these as poorly used wetlands which could not be drained, it is argued that their usage was adapted to the different conditions within the peat fens and that this allowed a range of resources to be exploited.
•Fractional vegetation coverage and surface roughness schemes were modified in CoLM.•The overestimation of LST is reduced by the revised CoLM.•The revised model performs better in simulating LST in ...summer than in winter.•Contributions of each component of the energy budget to LST changes were identified.
The application of Land surface models (LSMs) at regional scales still faces challenges and large uncertainties exist in simulating regional energy fluxes and land surface temperature (LST). This is possibly caused by their poor representations of surface parameter properties (e.g., fractional vegetation coverage (FVC) and surface roughness length (z0m)) to effectively capture vegetation dynamics. In this study, satellite-based FVC and z0m schemes were incorporated into the Common Land Model (CoLM) and their impacts on modeling energy fluxes and associated LST were further assessed over grassland and forest areas in China. Our results show that the annual mean LST was obviously overestimated by the original CoLM for both grassland and forest. The overestimation was reduced by the revised CoLM when compared with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST products. Concerning the seasonal patterns, the revised model performed evidently better in simulating LST in summer than in winter. Additionally, the decreased simulation of LST was dominated by a reduction of the surface absorbed short-wave radiation when applying the revised FVC scheme over both grassland and forest, while the increased sensible/latent heat fluxes contributed most to the reduction of LST for the revised z0m scheme in grassland/forest, respectively, indicating that land surface energy partitioning is sensitive to the FVC and z0m parameterizations. Results from this study suggest that the use of satellite-based dynamics of FVC and z0m parameterizations in the CoLM provides a valuable improvement in regional applications.
Display omitted
•The drip irrigation under plactic mulch module is incorporated into Common Land Model.•The Vapor fluxes indicate significant sensitivity relative to both the amount and timing of ...irrigation.•The lack of the module of plastic mulch will induce large fluctuation in simulated evapotranspiration.•The plastic mulch changes the energy balance on soil surface in oasis agroecosystems.
Drip irrigation under plastic mulch is a common agricultural practice for oasis agroecosystems in the extensive arid regions of northwest China, and it is widely used to improve agricultural production by suppressing soil evaporation. The widespread application of plastic mulch has also obviously altered land characteristics and the partitioning of vapor and energy between the surface and the atmosphere. However, these physical processes, to date, are poorly incorporated into land surface models. In this study, an irrigation scheme and a plastic mulch module were incorporated into the Common Land Model (CoLM) to examine their influences on vapor (evapotranspiration) and energy fluxes, and the evapotranspiration observations were used to evaluate the model performance of irrigation effects. A sensitivity analysis indicates significant sensitivity relative to both the amount and timing of irrigation on vapor and energy fluxes. In addition, our results show that the revised CoLM with an irrigation module produced a better simulation of evapotranspiration than the default CoLM. However, large uncertainties still exist that fluctuation in simulated evapotranspiration is substantial, without considering the impact of plastic mulch. Incorporating the mulch module improved the CoLM performance for both vapor and energy fluxes. Plastic mulch reduced net radiation, sensible and latent heat fluxes. It aslo suppressed ground heat fluxes at daytime but improved ground heat fluxes at nighttime. Our results indicate that the agricultural practice, drip irrigation under plastic mulch, should be implemented into CoLM and other land surface models for studying vapor and energy fluxes in oasis agroecosystems or other similar agricultural ecosystems.
Stomatal conductance (gs) and compensatory water uptake (CWU) are crucial processes in land surface models, as they directly influence the exchange of carbon and water fluxes between terrestrial ...ecosystems and the atmosphere. In this study, we integrated a new stomatal scheme derived from optimal stomatal theory (Medlyn's gs model), and an empirical CWU scheme into the Common Land Model (CoLM). Assessing the impacts on modeling gross primary productivity (GPP) and latent flux (LE) through observations obtained from eddy covariance (EC) measurements at three forest sites in China. Our results show that replacing the Ball-Berry's gs model (termed BB) with Medlyn's gs model (termed MED) did not bring about significant changes (had neutral impacts) in the performance of CoLM simulations at three forest sites. Considering the climate factors of annual mean precipitation to optimize key fitting parameters in gs exhibited improvement in model simulations. The average coefficient of determination (R2) achieved to 0.65 for GPP and LE at three sites, and the normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) decreased from 0.83 to 0.77 at those sites. Besides, incorporating CWU into the model improved its performance. The R2 increased to 0.84 and RMSE decreased to 4.84 μmol m−2 s−1 for GPP, and the R2 increased to 0.62 and RMSE decreased to 55.64 W m−2 for LE. Therefore, modifying the model process of both contributed more to enhancing the model simulations than relying solely on one of these functions. Our study highlights that the response of plant functional types (PFTs) to water stress can be effectively represented in gs models when coupled with biochemical capacity to quantify carbon and water fluxes in forest ecosystems or other ecosystems.
•Predicting bioclimatic variables enhance the effectiveness of stomatal conductance.•Refining stomatal conductance has limited impact on the model's improvement.•Incorporating the CWU can result in improved modeling of carbon and water fluxes.
Wind development creates a range of economic impacts at different territorial scales and sectors, one of which is the local sector at the rural level. Yet few studies make an in-depth study on the ...relationship between the implementation of wind farms and rural development. The literature scarcely analyzes the impact of payments to landowners and their potential for revitalizing rural areas above all in areas lacking public property where community wind farms are legally banned. These two circumstances converge in Galicia, a region in the northwest of Spain that currently operates over 3300 MW of wind power. This paper aims to analyze landowner payments and study their role in the rural development of the Galician territory from the perspective of the current regulatory framework. To this end, it uses different quantitative and qualitative methods such as participatory research tools used in the field work and developed for over 10 years. Our work estimates average payments to landowners and the total flow of wind-generated income reaching the rural areas, which was 0.84 million euros in 1999 and 10.1 million in 2015. It also analyzes final wind revenue destinations and identifies several examples of the dynamization of rural areas based on the innovative use of this income. Rural landowners developed very innovative community initiatives triggering local economic revitalization despite the averse current regulatory framework. The paper concludes that a more advantageous regulatory framework could have had a much greater local impact.
•First analysis wind landowners payments of a global wind system.•Landowner payments are an opportunity for the rural development.•Wind regulatory framework determines opportunities for the rural world.•Without shared wind farm ownership or community promoters, few rents for the rural.•In Galicia, communal landowners develop innovative initiatives.
This article analyzes a group of toponyms in Gata, in the province of Cáceres, which reflect the public ownership of the land named, mainly throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, when the town began ...to gain some importance because it belonged to the Military Order of Alcántara. From then on, the survival or disappearance of names has been subject to both linguistic and extra-linguistic conditions.
The article will discuss the general issues related to common land - the term applied in the Common Lands Act of 29 June 1963 and its legal nature. In addition, an attempt will be made to
answer the ...question about an entity that should be disclosed in the second section of the land and mortgage register in the case of real property being a part of the common land. Currently,
land and mortgage registers may be established for common land. The question is whether it should be the common land itself or natural and legal persons entitled to hold shares therein,
or maybe a company established to manage and develop such a common land. It seems that the legislator itself has been unable to deal with this issue. There are no legal acts where it would
indicate directly or indirectly an entity that should be disclosed in the second section of the land and mortgage register as an owner (co-owner).
Common notions about the source of communal land conflict in Africa have long explained it as growing out of conditions of environmental scarcity. This article argues instead that the institutional ...structure of the legal system is central to understanding which countries are prone to experience communal land conflict. When competing customary and modern jurisdictions coexist in countries inhabited by mixed identity groups, the conflicting sources of legal authority lead to insecurity about which source of law will prevail. Because the source of law is contested, conflict parties cannot trust the legal system to predictably adjudicate disputes, which encourages the use of extrajudicial vigilante measures. Using new data on communal violence in West Africa, this argument is examined for the period 1990–2009. The results show that in countries where competing jurisdictions exist, communal land conflict is 200–350% more likely. These findings suggest that researchers should consider the role of legal institutions and processes in relation to social unrest and collective violence.
PDF
