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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2025

Abstract

Urban agriculture (UA) is increasingly recognized as a key component of sustainable cities. Commercial farmers in urban areas benefit from a large customer base, short transport distances, and access to diverse sales channels. However, high pressure on land resources makes it difficult for farmers and decision makers to find suitable areas for UA. This study ranks urban and peri-urban farmland areas based on their suitability for urban agriculture (UA) and identifies opportunities for extending the area for UA to currently unused farmland. Through collaboration with urban farmers, we identified four key themes and eleven criteria, which were weighted for two sales scenarios: on-farm and off-farm. We performed a GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and assessed suitability using the technique of order preference similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) on 1 × 1 km grid cells. By overlaying the suitability maps with presumably unused farmland (PUF), we identified areas with high potential for extending UA. In the City of Bergen, 15.3 % (on-farm; off-farm=14 %) of the total farmland is both unused and highly suitable for UA, compared to only 2.8 % (on-farm; off-farm=2.4 %) in Oslo. Assessing the suitability of agricultural land for UA can support spatial planning, protect agricultural topsoil from urban expansion, and help achieve global, national, and local goals for urban farming and sustainable land use.

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Abstract

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Abstract

Data from the Norwegian national forest inventory spanning from 1994 to 2022 were analyzed to explore the growth dynamics of pure and mixed stands of Norway spruce and Scots pine. The derived large dataset enabled the development of models designed to assess how stand characteristics and drought interactively affect volume increment at the stand and individual tree level. The analysis revealed that pine-dominated stands outperform spruce-dominated stands at lower site qualities, while the opposite was true at higher site qualities. Mixed stands exhibited overyielding, with productivity exceeding the expected combined pure stand productivity of the individual species components. Based on model predictions, relative overyielding increased with stand age and declined with increasing site quality. Transgressive overyielding, where mixed stands outperform pure stands of either species, was predicted for medium site qualities. Drought-induced productivity losses increased with spruce proportion, especially at lower site qualities, and with stand density. The presence of pine in mixed stands mitigated the negative effects of drought on spruce. The findings of this study suggest that pure spruce stands should be avoided on lower-quality sites while mixed stands with appropriate thinning interventions should be promoted to maintain productivity under changing climatic conditions.