Script for re-creating the location of farms from non-spatial data

This data set contains files that are necessary for farm allocation method. They accompany the article “Re-creating the location of farms from non-spatial data: spatial allocation of single farm data” (authors: Sandra Uthes, Joachim Kiesel), submitted to the journal Agricultural Systems. The allocation methods was developed for modelling tasks requiring spatially-explicit farm locations, for example, to simulate land market decisions. Usually spatially-explicit farm data is not available for reasons of data protection and only farm typology data with aggregated spatial information (such as the share of arable land or the mean soil fertility of the farm) is at hand. Our method considers several landscape parameters for the allocation of farms, using a fine resolution (25m*25m) and introducing allocation quality indicators that allow for an assessment of the overall allocation result. The approach is implemented in the Geographical Information System (GIS) ArcInfo/ArcGIS by ESRI using the tools and script language (AML) offered by this software and operated on a BS Solares Unix Server.