It is a commonly held notion among many Aboriginal people that one’s worldview, knowledge, values and identity are shaped through the connection one has with the physical and spiritual components of their traditional territory; the land and waters, the beings which occupy these places and one’s ancestors. For the members of Missanabie Cree First Nation, the connection with their traditional territory was disrupted as a result of the failure of the Crown to set aside land in the treaty process in the early 20th Century. Through a review of literature on the Cree of Northern Ontario and Quebec, this thesis answers questions raised by the community concerning their ancestors’ traditional resource management methods, and the kinship roles associated with these methods. Q-method is used to determine the current day values the members hold regarding the land and waters in and around Missanabie. Knowledge of these values, where members agree and disagree, can assist leadership in making decisions about how to proceed in the reestablishment of a viable Aboriginal community within the traditional territory. From the Q-method, three factors which represent the members values emerged; Cultural and Spiritual Values, Economic and Conservation Values, and Community Infrastructure Values. The factors demonstrate that the First Nation holds a mix of traditional and contemporary values with differences appearing in how each factor describes members’ connection to the land and the desires of what members want the land to provide. To move forward in their journey toward reestablishment on their traditional lands, compromises and accommodations within the community need to be reached, and can best be achieved through comprehensive land management planning.

It is a commonly held notion among many Aboriginal people that one’s worldview, knowledge, values and identity are shaped through the connection one has with the physical and spiritual components of their traditional territory; the land and waters, the beings which occupy these places and one’s ancestors. For the members of Missanabie Cree First Nation, the connection with their traditional territory was disrupted as a result of the failure of the Crown to set aside land in the treaty process in the early 20th Century. Through a review of literature on the Cree of Northern Ontario and Quebec, this thesis answers questions raised by the community concerning their ancestors’ traditional resource management methods, and the kinship roles associated with these methods. Q-method is used to determine the current day values the members hold regarding the land and waters in and around Missanabie. Knowledge of these values, where members agree and disagree, can assist leadership in making decisions about how to proceed in the reestablishment of a viable Aboriginal community within the traditional territory. From the Q-method, three factors which represent the members values emerged; Cultural and Spiritual Values, Economic and Conservation Values, and Community Infrastructure Values. The factors demonstrate that the First Nation holds a mix of traditional and contemporary values with differences appearing in how each factor describes members’ connection to the land and the desires of what members want the land to provide. To move forward in their journey toward reestablishment on their traditional lands, compromises and accommodations within the community need to be reached, and can best be achieved through comprehensive land management planning.

It is a commonly held notion among many Aboriginal people that one’s worldview, knowledge, values and identity are shaped through the connection one has with the physical and spiritual components of their traditional territory; the land and waters, the beings which occupy these places and one’s ancestors. For the members of Missanabie Cree First Nation, the connection with their traditional territory was disrupted as a result of the failure of the Crown to set aside land in the treaty process in the early 20th Century. Through a review of literature on the Cree of Northern Ontario and Quebec, this thesis answers questions raised by the community concerning their ancestors’ traditional resource management methods, and the kinship roles associated with these methods. Q-method is used to determine the current day values the members hold regarding the land and waters in and around Missanabie. Knowledge of these values, where members agree and disagree, can assist leadership in making decisions about how to proceed in the reestablishment of a viable Aboriginal community within the traditional territory. From the Q-method, three factors which represent the members values emerged; Cultural and Spiritual Values, Economic and Conservation Values, and Community Infrastructure Values. The factors demonstrate that the First Nation holds a mix of traditional and contemporary values with differences appearing in how each factor describes members’ connection to the land and the desires of what members want the land to provide. To move forward in their journey toward reestablishment on their traditional lands, compromises and accommodations within the community need to be reached, and can best be achieved through comprehensive land management planning. / Forestry, Faculty of / Graduate

An increasing volume of empirical literature demonstrates the possibility of spatial autocorrelation in land value models. A number of objections regarding the methodology followed in those empirical studies have been raised. This thesis examines three propositions. The first proposition states that there is spatial dependence in the land value model in Roanoke County. The second proposition is that mechanical construction of neighborhood effects, or grouping nearby land parcels into neighborhoods, is not always the best way to capture spatial effects. Finally, the third and most important proposition states that by implementing a comprehensive set of individual and joint misspecification tests, one can better identify misspecification error sources and establish a more statistically sound and reliable model than models based on existing spatial econometric practices. The findings of this dissertation basically confirm the validity of those three propositions. In addition, we conclude that based on their development status prices of land parcels in Roanoke County may follow different stochastic processes. Changes in the values of hedonic variables have different implications for different groups of land parcels. / Ph. D.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Nathan P. Hendricks / This dissertation focuses on the prediction of agricultural land values and the effects of water rights on land values using machine learning algorithms and hedonic pricing methods. I predict agricultural land values with different machine learning algorithms, including ridge regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, random forests, and extreme gradient boosting methods. To analyze the causal effects of water right seniority on agricultural land values, I use the double-selection LASSO technique. The second chapter presents the data used in the dissertation. A unique set of parcel sales from Property Valuation Division of Kansas constitute the backbone of the data used in the estimation. Along with parcel sales data, I collected detailed basis, water, tax, soil, weather, and urban influence data. This chapter provides detailed explanation of various data sources and variable construction processes. The third chapter presents different machine learning models for irrigated agricultural land price predictions in Kansas. Researchers, and policymakers use different models and data sets for price prediction. Recently developed machine learning methods have the power to improve the predictive ability of the models estimated. In this chapter I estimate several machine learning models for predicting the agricultural land values in Kansas. Results indicate that the predictive power of the machine learning methods are stronger compared to standard econometric methods. Median absolute error in extreme gradient boosting estimation is 0.1312 whereas it is 0.6528 in simple OLS model. The fourth chapter examines whether water right seniority is capitalized into irrigated agricultural land values in Kansas. Using a unique data set of irrigated agricultural land sales, I analyze the causal effect of water right seniority on agricultural land values. A possible concern during the estimation of hedonic models is the omitted variable bias so we use double-selection LASSO regression and its variable selection properties to overcome the omitted variable bias. I also estimate generalized additive models to analyze the nonlinearities that may exist. Results show that water rights have a positive impact on irrigated land prices in Kansas. An additional year of water right seniority causes irrigated land value to increase nearly $17 per acre. Further analysis also suggest a nonlinear relationship between seniority and agricultural land prices.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Mykel R. Taylor / The average land price in Kansas has recently been through a period of large growth and decay, nearly doubling from 2010 to its peak in 2014, but falling from 2014 to 2017 in both real and nominal terms. However, there is anecdotal evidence that not all land prices are dropping at the same rate. Lower quality land prices seem to be dropping at a higher rate than the higher quality land prices. The goal of this analysis is to give analytical evidence to support the belief of different rates of price changes for different qualities of land. The hypothesis is that once the farm economy entered its period of negative growth, the producers that over-leveraged themselves needed to sell some of their assets to correct their balance sheets and that low quality land is the primary asset liquidated. The producers that did not over-leverage themselves would still be looking to purchase the right piece of land. This creates a surplus of less preferred low quality land on the market, while the supply and demand for the high quality land stays strong. This analysis was completed using 56,291 observations on land sales from 33 years starting at the beginning of 1985 and continuing on through the middle of 2017. A real price per acre for the land weighted by the number of acres in each parcel was calculated for each quarter, as well as a variable with the price of land lagged one quarter. Data on real net farm income, the S&P 500, and 30-year fixed-rate mortgage interest rates were also collected and used to create averages for each of the 131 quarters analyzed in this work. Finally, a variable representing the percent of all sales in each quarter in the bottom 25 percent in quality of all land sales was created. Quarterly dummy variables were included to control for seasonality. Two regressions were run with the only difference being the exclusion of the variable representing the bottom quality sales in the first in order to compare the results. Analysis of the first regression shows positive relationships between the dependent variable of the logged real price per acre and the independent variables of the logged lagged real price per acre, real net farm income, the S&P 500, and land sold during the third quarter of the year compared to the first quarter. There is a negative relationship suggested between the logged land price and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage interest rate. Inclusion of the variable representing sales of land in the bottom quartile of quality suggest results consistent with the first regression, with some of the variables becoming more statistically significant. More importantly, this analysis shows a negative relationship between average land price and the variable representing land quality. This shows that the average land price is affected by the quality of the land sold at a statistically significant level.

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Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Kevin Dhuyvetter / Land accounts for more than 75% of a farm operation’s total assets and thus knowledge of land values are very important to landowners. However, many other parties, including lenders, appraisers, investors, and researchers also have significant interest in land markets. Over the past few decades, land prices in Kansas have increased significantly for many different reasons. The main objective of this research is to estimate the impact of various factors on Kansas land values using a hedonic regression model. In cooperation with the Property Valuation Department (PVD) of the Kansas Department of Revenue, farmland market transactions from 1986 to 2009 were obtained for this study. Hedonic models were estimated using Ordinary Least Squares to determine the impact of interest rates, urban areas, location, parcel size, and income on nominal and real Kansas land values. The estimated nominal and real models explained 24.1% and 17.2% of the variation in land prices, respectively, and the results from this study are generally consistent with previous research. This research went further into investigating the relationship between PVD data and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveyed data. Results from this study indicate that USDA surveys significantly underestimate the true market for land prices across Kansas.

<P> This dissertation provides an investigation into the confluence of three basic themes; geography, land values, and municipal taxation. This research examines the role of geography as it applies to addressing the inherent structural problems of the municipal property tax system, which result in inequities in municipal tax burdens. These structural problems are caused, in part, because traditional specifications of mass appraisal models are unable to sufficiently incorporate the impact of geography and because the property tax system is based more heavily on the value of capital improvements, such as buildings, than the value of land. Convincing evidence suggests a municipal taxation system based more heavily on the value of land could help mitigate many negative consequences of the property tax; thus, this research examines a spatial paradigm for the estimation of urban land values in order to study the short-run implications of transitioning to a land value tax system. </p> <P> After reviewing geography's contribution to the professional practice of real estate appraisal, this dissertation describes a spatial decision support system (SDSS) that was used to extract and validate sales of vacant land from the population of real estate transactions that occurred in Hamilton, Ontario between 1995 and 2004. Vacant land transaction prices were used to explore the spatial dynamics of land price appreciation and depreciation rates, investigate the potential for spatial models to improve the accuracy and fairness of mass appraisal, and to simulate the spatial distribution of shifting tax liabilities for residential land uses under the property tax and land value tax systems in order to examine their relationship to area-based deprivation indices. Results suggest there remains much potential for geography to make significant contributions to assessment practice, municipal taxation, and urban planning. Furthermore, there is much potential for land value taxation to contribute to equitable and sustainable cities. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Market land prices ignore the non-market value of ecosystem goods and services; hence, too much agricultural land may be developed. Correct land valuation must include these non-market values. Values of ecosystem services provided by the Richland-Chambers constructed wetlands are assessed through meta-analysis to derive confidence intervals for the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for wetland services. Replacement costs are also used to estimate cost savings of creating wetlands to cleanse river water instead of constructing a conventional wastewater treatment facility. Benefit transfer is used to estimate WTP for non-market agricultural land amenities. Ecosystem services of runoff in the western and recharge in the eastern part of Comal County based on hydrological models are also calculated. Finally, seemingly unrelated regression is used to quantify the effects of growth on current agricultural land values in Texas. Using two different meta-analysis transfer functions, mean WTP for the Richland-Chambers wetlands are $843 and $999 / acre / year. Estimated 95% confidence interval is $95 to $7,435 / acre / year. This confidence interval clearly indicates the uncertainty associated with valuing ecosystem goods and services. The replacement cost of the Richland?Chambers constructed wetlands is estimated to be $1,688 / acre / year. Aggregate WTP to preserve farm and ranchland non-market amenities in Comal County is estimated to be $1,566 / acre. Using hydrologic models, the runoff is valued at $79 / acre, whereas, recharge value is $1,107 / acre. Development will cause a change in recharge, runoff, and pollution which will decrease societal welfare by $1,288 / acre. Seemingly unrelated regression results show that a percentage increase in population growth in the closest metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is associated with increases in land values of approximately $2 / acre. A one-mile increase in distance from the nearest MSA decreased land values by $4 / acre in 1997, $6 / acre in 2002, and $8 / acre in 2007. The diversity of studies illustrates that a cookbook type of methodology is not appropriate for valuing ecosystem goods and services. On the other hand, development contributes positively to land values through encroachment on agricultural lands.