Exploring the Determinants of Soil and Water Conservation Measures with Data Mining Techniques

This study explores different socioeconomic and environmental factors influencing the adoption of SWC (soil and water conservation) measures. As a consortium of national and international institutions, WOCAT (World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies) has developed a database system to record specific details about the environmental and socioeconomic setting in soil and water management. Factor analysis, as a data mining technique, was used in the present work and the results show that adoption of SWC measures were influenced primarily by four factors including economic efficiency, human setting and land use, natural environment and soil quality. The first factor named as economic efficiency explained 18.888% of the total variance which comprised of variables like short term returns to establishment, long term returns to establishment, short term returns to maintenance and long term returns to maintenance. The second factor called human setting and land use explained 17.546% (comprised of variables like land ownership, off-farm income, market orientation, wealth, production subsidy and size of crop land per household) and the third factor called natural environment explained 14.945% (comprised of variables like average annual rainfall and slope) of the total variance, respectively. Furthermore, forth factor called soil quality explained 13.483% of the total variance comprised of soil fertility and topsoil.