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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Power Law Distribution Of Agricultural Land Size, Lauren Chamberlain
The Power Law Distribution Of Agricultural Land Size, Lauren Chamberlain
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
This paper demonstrates that the distribution of county level agricultural land size in the United States is best described by a power-law distribution, a distribution that displays extremely heavy tails. This indicates that the majority of farmland exists in the upper tail. Our analysis indicates that the top 5% of agricultural counties account for about 25% of agricultural land between 1997-2012. The power-law distribution of farm size has important implications for the design of more efficient regional and national agricultural policies as counties close to the mean account for little of the cumulative distribution of total agricultural land. This has …
Random Forests Applied As A Soil Spatial Predictive Model In Arid Utah, Alexander Knell Stum
Random Forests Applied As A Soil Spatial Predictive Model In Arid Utah, Alexander Knell Stum
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Initial soil surveys are incomplete for large tracts of public land in the western USA. Digital soil mapping offers a quantitative approach as an alternative to traditional soil mapping. I sought to predict soil classes across an arid to semiarid watershed of western Utah by applying random forests (RF) and using environmental covariates derived from Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and digital elevation models (DEM). Random forests are similar to classification and regression trees (CART). However, RF is doubly random. Many (e.g., 500) weak trees are grown (trained) independently because each tree is trained with a new randomly …