Parameterisation of Rural Built-Up Areas for Analysing the Determinants of Land Consolidation Constraints

The characteristics of existing rural built-up areas may influence the scope and nature of land consolidation and agricultural land management. Built-up areas delineate the boundaries of current and potential agricultural land, determine the spatial structure of farms, and constitute major components of the local landscape. It may be assumed that a precise mathematical description of rural built-up areas would provide valuable information in the context of rural studies, including the comparative analyses of villages presented in this study and the development of predictive models aimed at assessing the difficulty of land consolidation. However, the complete implementation of this task has not yet been reported in the scientific literature. The aim of this study was to develop a methodology for the mathematical description of rural built-up areas, with particular emphasis on factors potentially influencing the difficulty of land consolidation. Based on an in-depth review of the scientific and technical literature, nine diverse and partially interrelated indicators were identified, and a precise method for their calculation was defined in this study. In addition, a set of scripts and programs was developed and made publicly available to automate the calculations, thereby enabling their application in future research. The obtained results enabled an objective and unambiguous description of villages, which is essential for research on the relationship between the structure of rural built-up areas and the difficulty of land consolidation in Poland.