Scenic value has long been recognized as an important feature in land use planning and management. In the US, several states have included scenic value provisions in their coastal zone legislation and required that reviews of project proposals consider scenic or aesthetic effects. In Rhode Island, all permitting decisions must take into account the effect of a proposed activity in the coastal zone, such as a new dock or expanded aquaculture facility, on scenic or aesthetic value. However, there is limited guidance for how the terms scenic value or aesthetic value should be interpreted.

In our research we investigated the optimal utilization of land resources for agricultural production in Tabriz County, Iran. A GIS-based Multi Criteria Decision Making land suitability analysis was performed. Hereby, several suitability factors including soils, climatic conditions, and water availability were evaluated, based on expert knowledge from stakeholders at various levels. An Analytical Hierarchical Process was used to rank the various suitability factors and the resulting weights were used to construct the suitability map layers.

China is a developing country plagued by a long-term and large-scale desertification, which causes serious environmental problems. At the same time, China also has a long history of fighting desertification, especially in the recent decades. Thus, we think China's experience and lessons may be very important and useful for other developing countries to promote the degradation mitigation and life improvement.

Increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration is expected to impact agricultural systems through a direct effect on leaf gas exchange and also due to effects on the global availability of good-quality water as a result of climate warming. Thus, the planning of land use for agriculture requires new tools to identify the capability of current cultivars to adapt to growth restrictions under new ambient conditions.

Following the national policy, the Department of Agriculture of Thailand has implemented a crop diversification program in several provinces of the country. This study, which was conducted in Nakhon Pathom Province, analyzed the extent of crop diversification and its determinants using primary information collected from 245 farm households using a structured questionnaire, and from selected farmer leaders and agricultural development officials. The study also assessed the effects of crop diversification on income and the inputs used.

En los últimos años han sido incuantificables las aplicaciones que se han llevado a cabo mediante la utilización de las denominadas Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica, bien a través del empleo de los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), bien mediante el manejo y el análisis de imágenes de satélite (Teledetección), o bien mediante la aplicación de técnicas estadísticas de análisis multivariantes.

Extensive economic growth, tourism activities and over-exploitation of resources have become the common causes of environmental degradation in Langkawi. The sudden development leap resulting from UNESCO's recognition of Langkawi Archipelago as a Global Geopark in 2007, leads to continuous conflicts between enhancing environmental protection and meeting tourism and development needs.

Erosion can have a significant impact on soil properties in areas characterized by undulating topography. The spatial trends of soil properties and the availability of soil nutrients change with land use conversion. Most studies on these changes in China, however, focus on the natural or agricultural ecosystems. Little attention has been paid to unique changes, such as the conversion of natural or agricultural land to economic development zones.

Land use change is the most pervasive force driving the degradation of watershed ecosystems. This article combines an econometric model of land use choice with models of watershed health indicators to examine the effects of land use policies on watershed ecosystems through their effect on land use. Our results suggest that incentive-based land use policies and property acquisition programs can have relatively large positive impacts on watershed health, while policies that change the returns to land use are less effective.

This paper presents a spatial framework which can be used to perform multi-criteria assessments for different purposes. We tested the framework on a case study of evaluating potential expansion for irrigated pasture in the Limestone Coast of South Australia. The core of the framework is the fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted averaging (FLOWA) model which integrates and implements fuzzy quantifiers, Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the ArcGIS environment.