Population growth, urbanisation and climate change represent significant pressures on urban water resources, requiring water managers to consider a wider array of management options that account for economic, social and environmental factors.

The productivity of semi-arid rangelands on the Arabian Peninsula is spatially and temporally highly variable, and increasing grazing pressure as well as the likely effects of climatic change further threatens vegetation resources. Using the Al Jabal al Akhdar mountains in northern Oman as an example, our objectives were to analyse the availability and spatial distribution of aboveground net primary production (ANPP) and the extent and causes of vegetation changes during the last decades with a remote sensing approach.

The Blue Nile (Abay) Highlands of Ethiopia are characterized by significant interannual climate variability, complex topography and associated local climate contrasts, erosive rains and erodible soils, and intense land pressure due to an increasing population and an economy that is almost entirely dependent on smallholder, low-input agriculture. As a result, these highland zones are highly vulnerable to negative impacts of climate variability.

The transition of land between forest and grassland has important implications for greenhouse gas emissions and removals. In this paper, we use New Zealand as a case study to comprehensively assess, compare and quantify the net climate change impact of shifting land use between temperate forest and grassland. Forests store large amounts of carbon in their biomass, whereas grasslands contain relatively little biomass carbon. These biomass changes tend to dominate the carbon balance under land-use change.

Future land-use changes are predicted to be influenced by both climate-driven environmental changes and concomitant changes in local economic conditions. Assessing the impact of climate change on ecosystems, and the goods and services that they provide, therefore requires an understanding of the dynamic link between land-cover, ecosystem services and economic-driven land-use decisions. The economic land allocation model (ALUAM) simulates the competition between forest and a range of agricultural land-uses to estimate land-use conversions in a spatially explicit manner at high resolution.

Land cover changes affect local surface energy balances by changing the amount of solar energy reflected, the magnitude and duration over which absorbed energy is released as heat, and the amount of energy that is diverted to non-heating fluxes through evaporation. However, such local influences often are only crudely included in climate modeling exercises, if at all. A better understanding of local land conversion dynamics can serve to inform inputs for climate models and increase the role for land use planning in climate management policy.

Desertification has been widely treated as one of the major environmental hazards in the world by scientific communities and the public. Monitoring the dynamics and causes of desertification is essential to provide important instruction for desertification control strategies and rational planning of land use in arid and semi-arid areas.

Cumulative human impacts across the world's oceans are considerable. We therefore examined a single model taxonomic group, the penguins (Spheniscidae), to explore how marine species and communities might be at risk of decline or extinction in the southern hemisphere. We sought to determine the most important threats to penguins and to suggest means to mitigate these threats. Our review has relevance to other taxonomic groups in the southern hemisphere and in northern latitudes, where human impacts are greater.

Subsidence in Yunlin County, Taiwan, is serious and continuous. The Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) route crosses the subsidence area and might be affected by differential settlements. It is important to evaluate the pumping quantity for water resource management and to predict the subsidence for land resource management to mitigate the subsidence problem in Taiwan.

Charismatic groups of animals and plants often are proposed as sentinels of environmental status and trends. Nevertheless, many claims that a certain taxonomic group can provide more-general information on environmental quality are not evaluated critically. To address several of the many definitions of indicator species, we used butterflies to explore in some detail the attributes that affect implementation of indicators generically.

Climate change will cause major changes in ecosystems. Therefore, it is crucial that climate change policy consider the value of all services that are provided by watershed ecosystems. For this purpose, geospatial data and economic analysis are combined to determine a monetary value for wetland ecosystem goods and services (EGSs) in the watersheds of the Yamaska and Bécancour Rivers (Quebec, Canada). From published studies of wetland economic evaluations, we selected 51 relevant studies from 21 countries and performed a benefit transfer using meta-analysis.

Natural and anthropogenic processes are causing extensive and rapid ecological, social, and economic changes in arid and semiarid ecosystems worldwide. Nowhere are these changes more evident than in the Great Basin of the western United States, a region of 400,000 km² that largely is managed by federal agencies.