IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v13y2021i3p1361-d488687.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Probability Distribution of Worldwide Forest Areas

Author

Listed:
  • Rafael González-Val

    (Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Campus Paraíso, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50005 Zaragoza, Spain
    Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB), Facultat d’Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona, 08034 Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract

This paper analyses the probability distribution of worldwide forest areas. We find moderate support for a Pareto-type distribution (power law) using FAO data from 1990 to 2015. Power laws are common features of many complex systems in nature. A power law is a plausible model for the world probability distribution of forest areas in all examined years, although the log-normal distribution is a plausible alternative model that cannot be rejected. The random growth of forest areas could generate a power law or log-normal distribution. We study the change in forest coverage using parametric and non-parametric methods. We identified a slight convergence of forest areas over the time reviewed; however, random forest area growth cannot be rejected for most of the distribution of forest areas. Therefore, our results give support to theoretical models of stochastic forest growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Rafael González-Val, 2021. "The Probability Distribution of Worldwide Forest Areas," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-19, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:3:p:1361-:d:488687
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1361/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1361/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yannis M. Ioannides & Henry G. Overman, 2004. "Spatial evolution of the US urban system," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 4(2), pages 131-156, April.
    2. Rafael Gonz�lez-Val & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia, 2013. "The accuracy of graphs to describe size distributions," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(17), pages 1580-1585, November.
    3. Xavier Gabaix & Parameswaran Gopikrishnan & Vasiliki Plerou & H. Eugene Stanley, 2006. "Institutional Investors and Stock Market Volatility," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(2), pages 461-504.
    4. Christian Walter, 2020. "Sustainable Financial Risk Modelling Fitting the SDGs: Some Reflections," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-28, September.
    5. Akhundjanov, Sherzod B. & Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2017. "Size distribution of national CO2 emissions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 182-193.
    6. Brzezinski, Michal, 2014. "Do wealth distributions follow power laws? Evidence from ‘rich lists’," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 406(C), pages 155-162.
    7. Jan Eeckhout, 2004. "Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1429-1451, December.
    8. Xiao-Yun Chen & Kwok-Wing Chau, 2019. "Uncertainty Analysis on Hybrid Double Feedforward Neural Network Model for Sediment Load Estimation with LUBE Method," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 33(10), pages 3563-3577, August.
    9. Xavier Gabaix & Rustam Ibragimov, 2011. "Rank - 1 / 2: A Simple Way to Improve the OLS Estimation of Tail Exponents," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(1), pages 24-39, January.
    10. Gabaix, Xavier & Ioannides, Yannis M., 2004. "The evolution of city size distributions," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 53, pages 2341-2378, Elsevier.
    11. Frayer, Jens & Müller, Daniel & Sun, Zhanli & Munroe, Darla K. & Xu, Jianchu, 2014. "Processes Underlying 50 Years of Local Forest-Cover Change in Yunnan, China," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 5(12), pages 3257-3273.
    12. Rupert Seidl & Dominik Thom & Markus Kautz & Dario Martin-Benito & Mikko Peltoniemi & Giorgio Vacchiano & Jan Wild & Davide Ascoli & Michal Petr & Juha Honkaniemi & Manfred J. Lexer & Volodymyr Trotsi, 2017. "Forest disturbances under climate change," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 7(6), pages 395-402, June.
    13. Willassen, Yngve, 1998. "The stochastic rotation problem: A generalization of Faustmann's formula to stochastic forest growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 573-596, April.
    14. Ioannides, Yannis & Skouras, Spyros, 2013. "US city size distribution: Robustly Pareto, but only in the tail," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 18-29.
    15. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2017. "Pareto tails and lognormal body of US cities size distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 465(C), pages 573-578.
    16. Yoshihiko Nishiyama & Susumu Osada & Yasuhiro Sato, 2008. "OLS ESTIMATION AND THE t TEST REVISITED IN RANK‐SIZE RULE REGRESSION," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(4), pages 691-716, October.
    17. Miguel Puente-Ajovín & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia, 2020. "Is there a universal parametric city size distribution? Empirical evidence for 70 countries," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 65(3), pages 727-741, December.
    18. Jinjin Gu & Hui Hu & Lin Wang & Wei Xuan & Yuan Cao, 2020. "Fractional Stochastic Interval Programming for Optimal Low Impact Development Facility Category Selection under Uncertainty," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 34(5), pages 1567-1587, March.
    19. M. Goldstein & S. Morris & G. Yen, 2004. "Problems with fitting to the power-law distribution," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 41(2), pages 255-258, September.
    20. Chen, Yanguang & Zhou, Yixing, 2008. "Scaling laws and indications of self-organized criticality in urban systems," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 85-98.
    21. Sloggy, Matthew R. & Kling, David M. & Plantinga, Andrew J., 2020. "Measure twice, cut once: Optimal inventory and harvest under volume uncertainty and stochastic price dynamics," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    22. William J. Reed, 2002. "On the Rank‐Size Distribution for Human Settlements," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 1-17, February.
    23. Guo, Christopher & Costello, Christopher, 2013. "The value of adaption: Climate change and timberland management," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 452-468.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rafael González‐Val, 2019. "Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800)," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 98(2), pages 1115-1136, April.
    2. Arshad, Sidra & Hu, Shougeng & Ashraf, Badar Nadeem, 2019. "Zipf’s law, the coherence of the urban system and city size distribution: Evidence from Pakistan," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 513(C), pages 87-103.
    3. Christian Schluter, 2021. "On Zipf’s law and the bias of Zipf regressions," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 61(2), pages 529-548, August.
    4. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando & González-Val, Rafael, 2013. "A new framework for the US city size distribution: Empirical evidence and theory," MPRA Paper 52190, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Rafael González-Val, 2019. "US city-size distribution and space," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 283-300, July.
    6. Christian Schluter & Mark Trede, 2019. "Size distributions reconsidered," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(6), pages 695-710, July.
    7. Rafael González-Val, 2021. "The Spanish spatial city size distribution," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 48(6), pages 1609-1631, July.
    8. Băncescu, Irina & Chivu, Luminiţa & Massing, Till & Preda, Vasile & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo, 2024. "On the parametric description of log-growth rates of Romanian city sizes," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 643(C).
    9. Rafael González-Val, 2012. "A Nonparametric Estimation of the Local Zipf Exponent for all US Cities," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 39(6), pages 1119-1130, December.
    10. Peña, Guillermo & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2022. "Log-growth rates of CO2: An empirical analysis," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 588(C).
    11. Rafael González-Val, 2016. "War Size Distribution: Empirical Regularities Behind Conflicts," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(6), pages 838-853, November.
    12. Tomoya Mori & Tony E. Smith, 2009. "A Reconsideration of the NAS Rule from an Industrial Agglomeration Perspective," KIER Working Papers 669, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    13. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2015. "US city size distribution revisited: Theory and empirical evidence," MPRA Paper 64051, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Behzod B. Ahundjanov & Sherzod B. Akhundjanov & Botir B. Okhunjanov, 2022. "Power law in COVID‐19 cases in China," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 185(2), pages 699-719, April.
    15. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen & Danforth, Diana, 2017. "The size distributions of all Indian cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 474(C), pages 237-249.
    16. Rafael GONZÀLEZ-VAL, 2012. "Zipf’S Law: Main Issues In Empirical Work," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 36, pages 147-164.
    17. Wen-Tai Hsu & Tomoya Mori & Tony E. Smith, 2014. "Spatial Patterns and Size Distributions of Cities," KIER Working Papers 882, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    18. repec:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p34 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Xin Li & Kyung-Min Nam, 2017. "One country, two “urban” systems: focusing on bimodality in China’s city-size distribution," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 59(2), pages 427-452, September.
    20. Bosker, Maarten & Brakman, Steven & Garretsen, Harry & Schramm, Marc, 2008. "A century of shocks: The evolution of the German city size distribution 1925-1999," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 330-347, July.
    21. Rafael González-Val & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia & María Vera-Cabello, 2015. "Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best?," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 94(1), pages 177-196, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:3:p:1361-:d:488687. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.