Rural places acquire value in different ways and geographers have adopted a range of approaches to understand the way value is created in land and place. This paper analyses the case of the Gimblett Gravels wine district in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. This district has been transformed over the space of 20 years from a peri-urban wasteland to, now, one of the most sought-after and expensive winegrowing areas in the country. In this process of revaluation, several forces were evident.

Agriculture is major sector in the economy of Central Asia. The sustainable use of agricultural land is therefore essential to economic growth, human well-being, social equity, and ecosystem services. However, salinization, erosion, and desertification cause severe land degradation which, in turn, degrade human health and ecosystem services. Here, we review the impact of agricultural land use in the five countries of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, during 2008–2013 in 362 articles.

Spatial indices measure the geometric arrangement of land use and land cover classes at various scales and are computationally adaptive with wavelet transform coefficients. Decision rules built on permutations of three spatial indices – energy, log energy and Shannon's diversity – are used to improve the accuracy of multi-resolution hierarchical wavelet-based classifications. Comparisons are made with classification results derived from other texture measures, as well as with classification results calculated from more conventional per-pixel techniques.

The 2003 reform of the European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduced Single Farm Payments (SFPs) which are decoupled payments conditional on cross-compliance, and allows these payments to be claimed for land kept fully idle but maintained in good agricultural and environmental conditions (GAEC). This paper focuses on the potential impact of the reform on land idling decisions in France with the help of a survey of the intentions of landowners.

Most of the land reforms in developing countries in recent decades follow a blueprint that is based on the property rights theory. This blueprint was supported by Western government-backed development aid institutions and the World Bank and intends to achieve a capitalization of property rights on land by formalization and individualization. Its supporters expect higher efficiency of the land markets and higher tenure security. The focus of the article is not so much on the formalization efforts themselves, but on the capitalization of the use rights.

The climate warming trend and city growth contribute to the generation of excessive heat in urban areas. This could be reduced by introducing vegetation and open water surfaces in urban design. This study evaluates the cooling efficiency of green and blue infrastructure to reduce urban heat load using a set of idealized case simulations and a real city model application for Vienna. The idealized case simulations show that the cooling effect of green and blue infrastructure is dependent on the building type, time of the day and in case of blue infrastructure, the water temperature.

In the course of a survey we’ve researched private farms of the West-Transdanubian Region in terms of their land area, economic farm size, land use and types of their enterprise.

River ecosystems are driven by linked physical, chemical, and biological subsystems, which operate over different temporal and spatial domains. This complexity increases uncertainty in ecological forecasts, and impedes preparation for the ecological consequences of climate change. We describe a recently developed “multi-modeling” system for ecological forecasting in a 7600 km² watershed in the North American Great Lakes Basin.

Central Asia has experienced drastic socio-economic, geopolitical, and ecological transitions within the last few decades. The USSR collapse in 1991 has led to widespread changes in land cover and land use due to economic and political transformations within the region. Management practices during and after the Soviet era have intensified ecological problems and demands on resources.

Soil erosion is a major global environmental problem that has caused many issues involving land degradation, sedimentation of waterways, ecological degradation, and nonpoint source pollution. Therefore, it is significant to understand the processes of soil erosion and sediment transport along rivers, and this can help identify the erosion prone areas and find potential measures to alleviate the environmental effects.