Hierarchization of Land Consolidation Works in the Rural Areas of Central Poland

According to studies carried out by the authors, the development of agricultural production space in the analyzed area resulted in a highly defective spatial structure of agricultural land. The resulting defective spatial structure must be urgently rearranged in line with the achievements of the 21st century. However, land consolidation and exchange cannot be performed in such an extensive area, primarily for economic reasons. In connection with this fact, a hierarchy of needs for land consolidation and exchange works and their urgency must be established using objective methods of assessment. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the needs for land consolidation and exchange in the villages of the gmina of Drzewica, in the poviat of Opoczno, Łódź voivodeship. In administrative terms, the analyzed gmina consists of 17 villages and Drzewica – a town with poviat rights that was not included in the study. The total area covered by the study is 10600.1851 ha. The analyses were based on 24 features describing each of the villages, split into 4 thematic groups. First of the groups (general features) includes the total area of the village, total number of plots, number of inhabitants, average area of plots owned by private owners in respective precincts. The second group, referring to private land, comprises features connected with land owned by private farmers, including: number of registration units in the group of farms, number of plots and average area of plots in those units. The third group is productivity ratios for cropland and grassland. Group four comprises plots without access to roads where the number and area of real properties without access to roads was determined. In the last group the ratios of fragmentation, their average value and percentage of the area of plots covered by orchards and forestland were determined along with the average value of and the synthetic elongation ratio for plots within the precinct. The used features describe the spatial structure of the analyzed villages in detail. The rankings of urgency of land consolidation and exchange works for respective villages were developed using the zero unitarization method and Hellwig's method. Both, for Hellwig's calculations and the zero unitarization method the values of synthetic measures fall within the range [0;1]. These rankings were created by means of synthetic measures of the urgency of consolidation. The measures can be used to classify objects according to the size of multi-theme and multi-feature phenomenon, that is, the analyzed spatial structure of land in the presented community (gmina).