Spatial Structure and Scaling of Agricultural Networks

Abstract: Considering agricultural landscapes as networks can provide information about spatial connectivity relevant for a wide range of applications including pollination, pest management, and ecology. Global agricultural networks are well-described by power law rank-size distributions. However, regional analyses capture only a subset of the total global network. Most analyses are regional. In this paper, we seek to address the following questions: Does the globally observed scale-free property of agricultural networks hold over smaller spatial domains? Can similar properties be observed at kilometer to meter scales? We analyze 9 intensively cultivated Landsat scenes on 5 continents with a wide range of vegetation distributions. We find that networks of vegetation fraction within the domain of each of these Landsat scenes exhibit substantial variability - but still possess similar scaling properties to the global distribution of agriculture. We also find similar results using a 39 km2 IKONOS image. To illustrate an application of spatial network analysis, we show an example of network disruption. We compare two networks with similar rank-size distributions that behave differently when nodes are progressively removed. We suggest that treating agricultural land cover as spatial networks can provide a straightforward way of characterizing the connectivity of complex spatial distributions of agriculture across a wide range of landscapes and at spatial scales relevant for practical agricultural applications.