In West Africa, where the expansion of the Sahara has pushed breeders and farmers farther south since the early 70's, elephants have been squeezed out of arable areas.
Our results suggest that the average shares of arable areas and 1,000-m 1,000-mes to protectedistanceso notolimit the allocation of GM maize.
Today, biofuels are among the stronger competitors in the usage of arable areas for foods (European Commission 2006, 2010a, b; FAO 2013).
We expected that larger average sizes of arable areas would lower the SUA, but the two are not correlated (p > 0.05).
Green roofs, especially productive ones (e.g. of edible biomass), are urban ecosystems developed in response to the scarcity of arable areas in urban environments.
Nonetheless, although the states and counties of Germany vary in the average size of arable areas, the share of protected sites and the share of maize, we found only a marginal effect of the minimum distance to protected sites (1,000 m) on the GM area available for cultivation.
As expected, these three parameters are related to each other, with the most significant correlation (p < 0.001) for the maize share with the share of protected areas (r = −0.25) and for the maize share with the average size of arable areas (r = −0.22).
Although large and fixed isolation distances usually disregard landscape specifics, our results for Germany suggest that the average shares of arable areas are not relevant and that buffering of protected areas (1,000 m) does not limit the allocation of GM maize.
Much of the arable area consists of fallow cultivated land or steppes and mountains that serve as pastureland.
% changes relative to the baseline are presented in brackets Key Length options total length of all length based options, Grassland options total area of all grassland area based options, Arable options total area of all arable area based options, Tree/plot options total numbers of tree and plot based options.
