The aims of this study are to describe the ecological classification of land in Italy and to show how the resulting land units can act as reliable frameworks for coarse scale environmental analyses that can be used to implement national conservation strategies. We first collected, homogenised and drew physical thematic maps, which were then linked to biological and human features. We then performed a gap analysis of land heterogeneity compared with Natural Protected Areas and Natura2000 network on the basis of three categories: Total gaps, Partial gaps, and Protected.

Prior studies exploring the quantitative relationship between landscape structure metrics and the ecological condition of receiving waters have used a variety of sampling units (e.g., a watershed, or a buffer around a sampling station) at a variety of spatial scales to generate landscape metrics resulting in little consensus on which scales best describe land-water relationships. Additionally, the majority of these studies have focused on freshwater systems and it is not clear whether results are transferable to estuarine and marine systems.

Agriculture has played and still plays a significant role in the life of rural communities and in rural development. But, because agriculture yields low revenues, agricultural workers often need a source of additional income. Agriculture combines excellently with the growing of medicinal herbs, organic farming, handicrafts and tourism. Rural tourism, as originally conceived, is a source of revenue to supplement income from agriculture.

The Brazilian tropical savanna (Cerrado), encompassing more than 204 million hectares in the central part of the country, is the second richest biome in Brazil in terms of biodiversity and presents high land use pressure. The objective of this study was to map the land cover of the Cerrado biome based on the segmentation and visual interpretation of 170 Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus satellite scenes acquired in 2002. The following land cover classes were discriminated: grasslands, shrublands, forestlands, croplands, pasturelands, reforestations, urban areas, and mining areas.

Combined elaboration of the first and second parts of papers prepared for presentation at the IAMO FORUM 2007 Halle, Germany 24-29 June 2007 and the IAAE-EAAE 104th seminar Budapest, Hungary 6-8 September 2007.

Phytodiversity is affected both by natural and anthropogenic factors and in Island ecosystems these impacts can devastate or reduce diversity, if the native vegetation is lost. In addition to rich species richness and diversity, Island systems are the sites of high endemism and any threat to these ecosystems will consequently lead to loss and extinction of species.

This article presents an investigation of relationships between organic farming and landscape composition in Denmark. Landscape composition was analysed in terms of density of uncultivated landscape elements (I), number of land uses per hectare (II), diversity of land use (III) and mean field size (IV). Two analytical approaches were used. The first was based on an examination of the national agricultural registers for 1998, 2001 and 2004.

Climate change is affecting biodiversity worldwide inducing species to either “move, adapt or die”. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for analysing range shifts, namely a catalogue of the possible patterns of change in the distribution of a species along elevational or other environmental gradients and an improved quantitative methodology to identify and objectively describe these patterns.

This paper investigated the spatial and temporal variations of the water vapor pressure (WVP) of the arid region of northwest China (ARNC) from 1961 to 2011. The original daily temperature and relative humidity data were collected from 96 meteorological stations in the region and analyzed by a Mann–Kendall test and linear trend. The results showed that (1) the WVP possesses vertical zonality and longitude zonality, which decreased from the low to high with the elevation increasing, and the WVP changed obviously from the northwest and southeast to the middle of the ARNC.

AIM: The rate of climate change might exceed the migration capacity of plants, particularly where habitats became fragmented by human land use. Except for some tree species, the extent to which habitat fragmentation decreases migration rates has nevertheless been little evaluated. Here, we compare simulated migration rates of understorey herbs, which comprise the big part of temperate forest plant diversity, under varying levels of fragmentation at a continental scale. LOCATION: Europe.

Soil erosion caused by low vegetation cover associated with agricultural land use in the catchment is blamed for the eutrophication of Lake Victoria. Above-ground biomass as an indicator of vegetation cover and biodiversity was assessed using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, estimation of tree density and biomass with the aim of assessing the extent to which vegetation covers the soil surface. Tree density is significantly different between agricultural and semi-natural systems with an average of 96 and 90 trees ha⁻¹ observed in Rakai and Mayuge respectively.