Kenneth M. Sylvester

Navigating time and space in population studies

Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- Chapter 1: An Innovative Methodology for Space-Time Analysis with an Application to the 1960-2000 Brazilian Mortality Transition: Carl P. Schmertmann, Joseph E. Potter, and Renato M. Assuncao.- Chapter 2: Spatial Aspects of the American Fertility Transition in the Nineteenth Century: Michael R. Haines and J. David Hacker.- Chapter 3: Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Fertility Transition in Muslim Populations: Hani A. Guend.- Chapter 4: Spatial and Temporal Analyses of Surname Distributions to Estimate Mobility and Changes in Historical Demography: The Example of Savoy (France) from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century: Pierre Darlu, Guy Brunet, and Dominique Barbero.- Chapter 5: Widening Horizons? The Geography of the Marriage Market in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth Century Netherlands: Peter Ekamper, Frans van Poppel, and Kees Mandemakers.- Chapter 6: Finding Frontiers in the U.S. Great Plains from the End of the Civil War to the Eve of the Great Depression: Myron P. Gutmann, Glenn D. Deane, and Kristine Witkowski.- Chapter 7: Commonalities and Contrasts in the Development of Major United States Urban Areas: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis from 1910 to 2000: Andrew A. Beveridge.- Chapter 8: Economic Transition and Social Inequality in Early Twentieth Century Puerto Rico: Katherine J. Curtis.- Index.

Ecological Frontiers on the Grasslands of Kansas: Changes in Farm Scale and Crop Diversity.

Farms stood at an ecological frontier in the 1930s. With new and better agricultural machinery, more farms than ever before made the leap to thousand acre enterprises. But did they abandon mixed husbandry in the process? This article explores the origins of the modern relationship between scale and diversity using a new sample of Kansas farms. In 25 townships across the state, between 1875 and 1940, the evidence demonstrates that relatively few plains farms were agents of early monoculture. Rather than a process driven by single-crop farming, settlement was shaped by farms that grew more diverse with each generation.

Exploring agent-level calculations of risk and returns in relation to observed land-use changes in the US Great Plains, 1870–1940

Land-use change in the US Great Plains since agricultural settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century has been well documented. While aggregate historical trends are easily tracked, the decision making of individual farmers is difficult to reconstruct. We use an agent-based model to tell the history of the settlement of the west by simulating farm-level agricultural decision making based on historical data about prices, yields, farming costs, and environmental conditions. The empirical setting for the model is the period between 1875 and 1940 in two townships in Kansas, one in the shortgrass region and the other in the mixed grass region. Annual historical data on yields and prices determine profitability of various land uses and thereby inform decision making, in conjunction with the farmer’s previous experience and randomly assigned levels of risk aversion. Results illustrating the level of agreement between model output and a unique and detailed set of household-level records of historical land use and farm size suggest that economic behavior and natural endowments account for land change processes to some degree, but are incomplete. Discrepancies are examined to identify missing processes through model experiments, in which we adjust input and output prices, crop yields, agent memory, and risk aversion. These analyses demonstrate that how agent-based modeling can be a useful laboratory for thinking about social and economic behavior in the past.

A landscape ecology assessment of land-use change on the Great Plains-Denver (CO, USA) metropolitan edge

For better or worse, in those parts of the world with a widespread farming, livestock rising, and urban expansion, the maintenance of species richness and ecosystem services cannot depend only upon protected natural sites. Can they rely on a network of cultural landscapes endowed with their own associated biodiversity? We analyze the effects of land-cover change on landscape ecological patterns and processes that sustain bird species richness associated to cropland-grassland landscapes in the Great Plains-Denver metropolitan edge. Our purpose is to assess the potential contribution to bird biodiversity maintenance of Great Plain’s cropland-grassland mosaics kept as farmland green belts in the edge of metropolitan areas. We present a quantitative landscape ecology assessment of land-cover changes (1930–2010) experienced in five Great Plains counties in Colorado. Several landscape metrics assess the diversity of land-cover patterns and their impact on ecological connectivity indices. These metrics are applied to historical land-cover maps and datasets drawn from aerial photos and satellite imagery. The results show that the cropland-grassland mosaics that link the metropolitan edge with the surrounding habitats sheltered in less human-disturbed areas provide a heterogeneous land matrix were a high bird species richness exists. They also suggest that keeping multifunctional farmland-grassland green belts near the edge of metropolitan areas may provide important ecosystem services, supplementing traditional conservation policies. Our maps and indicators can be used for selecting certain types of landscape patterns and priority areas on which biodiversity conservation efforts and land-use planning can concentrate.