Quantifying the potential impacts of increasing agricultural fragmentation on land value

Societal expectations from rural lands have traditionally been focussed on the production of food and fibre. Yet the perception of rural areas is changing and they are now seen in many instances to be capable of delivering multiple functions or non-commodity outputs including land conservation and the preservation of biodiversity, contributing to the sustainable management of renewable natural resources and enhancing the socio-economic viability of many areas (OECD, 2001). The overall multifunctionality is constrained or favoured by biophysical and socio-economic drivers. As these types of drivers vary spatially and temporally, so does the functionality of the landscape and heterogeneous patterns emerge. Associated with multiple functions at a single location are a variety of pressures which can manifest themselves as conflict between interacting land uses (Gimona and van der Horst, 2007; Willemen et al., 2010). One such conflict in rural zones is that between agricultural use and residential use