Widespread and increasing urbanization has resulted in the need to assess, monitor, and understand its effects on stream water quality. Identifying relations between stream ecological condition and urban intensity indicators such as impervious surface provides important, but insufficient information to effectively address planning and management needs in such areas.

Since China's economic reform in the late 1970s, Shanghai, the country's largest and most modern city, has experienced rapid expansion and urbanization. Here, we explore its land‐use and land‐cover changes, focusing on the impacts of the urbanization process on air and water quality, local climate, and biodiversity. Over the past 30 years, Shanghai's urban area and green land (eg urban parks, street trees, lawns) have increased dramatically, at the expense of cropland.

Lidar and orthophotograph-derived land cover are combined with in situ vegetation measurements to assess habitat characteristics typifying four species of butterflies with differing habitat preferences across a large spatial extent (∼30,000 ha) in northern Idaho, USA. Lidar data are employed to characterize both vegetation structure and topography, whereas digital orthophotographs and in situ vegetation measurements are employed to quantify surrounding land use and larval host plant cover, respectively.

Residents, developers and civic officials are often faced with difficult decisions about appropriate land uses in and around metropolitan boundaries. Urban expansion brings with it the potential for negative environmental impacts, but there are alternatives, such as conservation subdivision design (CSD) or low-impact development (LID), which offer the possibility of mitigating some of these effects at the development site.

Increasing dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in lakes, rivers and streams in northern mid latitudes have been widely reported during the last two decades, but relatively few studies have dealt with trends in DOC export. We studied the export of DOC from Finnish rivers to the Baltic Sea between 1975 and 2010, and estimated trends in DOC fluxes (both flow normalised and non-normalised). The study encompassed the whole Finnish Baltic Sea catchment area (301,000km²) covering major land use patterns in the boreal zone.

Hydrologic data from agricultural watersheds are necessary to identify long-term trends and to develop and validate hydrologic and water quality models. These types of data have been collected for 70 yr at the North Appalachian Experimental Watershed (NAEW) near Coshocton, OH. The NAEW has 19 small (0.5–3.0-ha), single-land-use watersheds for which surface runoff data have been collected year round on an event basis for various time periods since 1939. There are six large (17–123-ha), mixed-use watersheds with perennial streams where flow is measured continuously.

The importance of the role of local community forestry institutions towards forest conservation is exemplified through a comparison of two adjacent areas within the Central Yucatan Peninsular Region (CYPR) in which Land-Use Cover Change (LUCC) analyses were conducted. We also used logistic regression analyses to examine key environmental, socioeconomic and institutional drivers associated with deforestation.

The Eco-Indicator 98 project aims at a complete revision of the Eco-Indicator 95 methodology. Like its predecessor, the target is to develop single scores for designers. The method now includes resources and land use. Important improvements are: the use of fate analysis, the much better definition of the damage categories concerned with human health and ecosystem health, using the PAF (Potentially Affected Fraction) and DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years) concept, and a completely new approach to modelling resources and land use.

Deriving a priori gridded parameters is an important step in the development and deployment of an operational distributed hydrologic model. Accurate a priori parameters can reduce the manual calibration effort and/or speed up the automatic calibration process, reduce calibration uncertainty, and provide valuable information at ungauged locations. Underpinned by reasonable parameter data sets, distributed hydrologic modeling can help improve water resource and flood and flash flood forecasting capabilities.

Livestock-water productivity (LWP) refers to a set of innovations that could contribute towards reducing the amount of water needed per unit of output generated. But what does it take to get these ideas adopted by livestock keepers in crop-livestock systems? In this paper, we treat LWP as an innovation, and consider in what ways it may be introduced and/or developed among the crop-livestock agricultural systems by drawing on successful examples of change.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was formulated a term of intra-farm organization of the territory of an agricultural enterprise. There was examined its content, role and meaning in the organization of agricultural production. On-farm organization of a territory of an agricultural enterprise represents a regularization of allocation of a complex of interrelated and interdependent sustainable elements of a territory which included natural and anthropogenic objects. There were presented the parameters, which characterized intra-farm organization of the territory.