The combined effects of erosive rains, steep slopes and human land use have caused severe land degradation in the Ethiopian Highlands for several thousand years, but since the 1970s, however, land rehabilitation programmes have been established to try to reverse deterioration. In order to characterize and quantify the transformations in the north Ethiopian Highlands, a study was carried out over 8884 km² of the Tigray Highlands of northern Ethiopia.

Nutrient mass balances have been used to assess a variety of land resource scenarios, at various scales. They are widely used as a simple basis for policy, planning, and regulatory decisions but it is not clear how accurately they reflect reality. This study provides a critique of broad-scale nutrient mass balances, with particular application to the fertiliser use of beef lot-feeding manure in Queensland.

This study of the adoption of maize production technologies in Eastern Tanzania forms part of a larger study to evaluate the impact of maize research and extension throughout Tanzania over the past 20 years. Using a structured questionnaire, researchers and extension officers interviewed farmers in June-November 1995. Survey data were classified by agroecological zone (the lowlands and the intermediate zone).

In Poland significant changes in landscape intensified after the political transformation in late 1980’s. One of the signs of the changes are more transformations of agricultural land into developed land (industry, housing, services). At the same time, abandoned land started overgrowing with trees and brushwood. These are a result of changes in living and housing conditions, technical progress and changes in legislation. Local spatial plan is a planning act that defines the designation of the land in Poland.

Export-oriented shrimp aquaculture appeared in the coastal landscape of Peru in the late 1970s. Its rapid development has entailed both positive and negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts across the newly emerging shrimp farming territory of the Tumbes river delta. Here we combine ground surveys and interviews with remote sensing analysis of the transformed environment in order to characterize and quantify the nature, origin and scale of the environmental and social impacts caused by the intrusion of aquaculture.

The productivity of arid environments and the reproductive success of vertebrates in these systems, are typically thought to be primarily influenced by rainfall patterns. Data from our 15 year study at an Australian arid zone site reveals asynchronous demographic responses to rainfall and other climatic variables among different lizard species.

Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context.

Although protected areas have become the primary mechanism for biodiversity conservation, their establishment can have long-term impacts on land use, land cover, and livelihoods of people living near them. Where land use and resource extraction is severely limited, local people turn to resource pools outside parks. Kibale National Park in western Uganda is a remnant of a previously larger, mid-altitude forest region surrounded by dense agricultural settlement.

Ecosystems around the world are already threatened by land‐use and land‐cover change, extraction of natural resources, biological disturbances, and pollution. These environmental stressors have been the primary source of ecosystem degradation to date, and climate change is now exacerbating some of their effects. Ecosystems already under stress are likely to have more rapid and acute reactions to climate change; it is therefore useful to understand how multiple stresses will interact, especially as the magnitude of climate change increases.

Due to an aging landowner population, there will be an unprecedented ownership shift in land-based assets in the USA. Approximately 2.7 million family forest owners (FFOs) in the USA over the age of 55 years old, reflecting 80 % of all FFO-owned land, will be deciding the future ownership and use of their land, having significant implications for the landscapes and public benefits these forests provide. Little is known about how FFOs plan for the future ownership and use of their land.

Heat island is the main product of urban climate, and one of the important problems of twenty-first century. Cities in tropical countries suffer extensively due to the urban heat island effect, and urban climate studies are necessary to improve the comfort level and city planning. Chennai is the tropical city; it is the fourth largest metropolis in India and one of the fastest growing economic and industrial growth centers in South Asia.

Qinglong County in Guizhou, China is a typical karst canyon area. Using quadrat methods and a land use transfer matrix we studied the carbon storage spatial distribution pattern and evolution process over three independent periods (1988, 1999 and 2009) in this area. Based on the results we estimated the carbon pool capacity of the entire karst canyon area in Guizhou and contribution ratios. Carbon storage and average carbon density of the karst area in Qinglong decreased at first, and then increased over the sampling period.