Analysis of spatial patterns and driving factors of farmland loss

In many countries, farmland is converted to other land uses. This conversion is linked to struc-tural changes within agriculture and the decreasing number of farms, but it is also caused by urbanisa-tion, industrialisation and the changing societal ex-pectations towards the countryside. Specifically in peri-urban areas, we see an increasingly complex differentiation of rural land use and conflicting inter-ests among the involved actors. In order to under-stand the trend of farmland loss, we picture recent farmland loss in Flanders based on a comparison of Flemish LPIS-data between 1998 and 2013. In this short paper, preliminary results are described. First, we present figures on the evolution of farmland area for two cases (Flanders and Ghent). Furthermore we explored spatial planning policy as one possible ex-plaining factor for this evolution.