One of the prerequisites of the REDD+ mechanism is to effectively predict business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios for change in forest cover. This would enable estimation of how much carbon emission a project could potentially prevent and thus how much carbon credit should be rewarded. However, different factors like forest degradation and the lack of linearity in forest cover transitions challenge the accuracy of such scenarios. Here we predict and validate such BAU scenarios retrospectively based on forest cover changes at village and district level in North Central Vietnam.

Policy development can fail when organisations tasked with managing contentious species for different outcomes are at odds. Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris L. syn. Pennisetum ciliare L. Link) has been planted worldwide and is a valuable pasture grass but it is contentious because of its environmental impacts. Due to this contention, government agencies in Australia have been reticent about developing policy for sustainable management of buffel grass.

Due to impacts of albedo on climate change, benefits of afforestation/reforestation regimes are under debate. In this paper we investigate how to incorporate albedo changes in a carbon accounting tool to show the net effect of land use change on the climate. Using a study area in southern Europe, albedo and carbon sequestration modelling results are linked to determine the combined radiative forcing balance.

The Himalayan watersheds are susceptible to various forms of degradation due to their sensitive and fragile ecological disposition coupled with increasing anthropogenic disturbances. Owing to the paucity of appropriate technology and financial resources, the prioritization of watersheds has become an inevitable process for effective planning and management of natural resources. Lidder catchment constitutes a segment of the western Himalayas with an area of 1,159.38 km².

This paper assesses the image differencing technique for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the second principal component (PC2), and the TM 4 band (TM 4), as well as the post-classification comparison (PCC) in order to analyze the land use/land cover changes in the South-East Transilvania, Romania. The analysis was performed using two frames from Landsat 5 TM satellite images acquired on August 5, 1993 and July 24, 2009. After applying the NDVI, PC2, and TM 4 image differencing techniques, the images obtained were transformed into change/no change maps.

Climate change is predicted to have widespread impacts on freshwater lake and reservoir nutrient budgets by altering both hypolimnetic hypoxia and runoff, which will in turn alter the magnitude of internal and external nutrient loads. To examine the effects of these potential climate scenarios on nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) budgets, we conducted a whole-catchment manipulation of hypolimnetic oxygen conditions and external loads to Falling Creek Reservoir (FCR), an old, eutrophic reservoir in a reforested catchment with a history of agricultural land use.

Greenhouse gas emissions and land use/land cover change (LUCC) are two human activities notably affecting climate change. Will temperature and precipitation increase significantly during global warming resulting in more pronounced LUCC climatic effects? Considering the interannual forcing of these two factors, the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM4.0) was used in this study to investigate the importance of climatological background to LUCC impacts.