The dry rangelands of West Asia and North Africa are fragile and severely degraded due to low rainfall and mismanagement of natural resources. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) interventions are used to increase soil moisture content, vegetation cover, and productivity. However, adoption of rainwater harvesting by communities is slow. To understand adoption constraints and to develop options for sustainable integration of rainwater harvesting, a benchmark watershed was established in the dry rangelands of Jordan.

Site selection is a key factor in any aquaculture operation, affecting both success and sustainability as well as solving conflicts between different activities and making rational use of the land. The study was conducted to identify appropriate site for the farming of giant prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, in Companigonj of Noakhali, Bangladesh using GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation taking 20 base layers of water quality, soil characteristics and infrastructure facilities.

Wind farm siting can be considered as Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem that consists of set of alternative locations and set of selection criteria. This study applied multi-criteria decision making approach using Analytical Hierarchy Process with Ordered Weigh Averaging AHP-OWA aggregation function to derive wind farm land suitability index and classification under Geographical Information System (GIS) environment. Linguistic quantifier’s version of AHP-OWA aggregation function was used to classify lands based on their suitability for wind farm installation.

The Kalahari ecosystem is characterized by natural resource conflicts and land-use pressure resulting from intensification of human activities. This paper addresses three issues of concern associated with the Kalahari ecosystem resource management: (i) the major land-use/land cover shifts in the Kalahari ecosystem since 1970 and the resulting pattern in vegetation species composition, cover and density; (ii) the possible explanations for the observed shifts; and (iii) the possible resource conflicts likely to arise.

New developments in geographic information science and technology are changing the way we apply GIS to developing-world agriculture, creating new opportunities to utilize the technology to address problems of disaster management, climate change, land use change, land degradation, crop analysis and impact assessment.GIS allows data and demographic information to be presented graphically, primarily in maps, but also in business tools such as charts, graphs and other reports.

This work describes a methodology for Strategic Environmental Assessment of urban areas in Latin America based on the recently approved European Planning Directive, and applies it to the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (Chile). The method is based on the Land Suitability Index (LSI), a cartographic GIS-based index originally developed for the region of Barcelona (Spain) and aimed at determining the suitability of each point in a region for urban development, considering three sub-indexes: (i) Naturalness, (ii) Ecological Connectivity and (iii) Natural Risk.

The geological environment has been heavily polluted by chemical substances over the past few decades. Pollution sources located on the earth’s surface or underground have affected the quality of the environment. A significant amount of impact could be reduced if the allocation of potential pollution sources was based on an evaluation of environmental conditions. The main objective of this study was to develop a methodology for the allocation of potential pollution sources by employing GIS and multi-criteria evaluation techniques.

The aim of this research was to determine physical land evaluation of hazelnut areas of Ordu-Unye and its vicinity. The study area, is located between west of Ordu and south of Samsun provinces, at coordinates 4542500-4537500 km N and 342500-347500 km E (UTM), covers approximately 31.5 km2. The study area consists of various topographic features such as, hilly and rolling physiographic units commonly. Elevation varies from 200 m to 600 m above sea level. Average annual precipitation and temperature are 1162.4 mm and 14.2ºC, respectively.

This paper presents a GIS framework for multi-criteria evaluation of land suitability for the expansion or retirement of irrigated cropland at a catchment scale in Australia. This framework is based on the fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted averaging (FLOWA) approach which integrates the analytical hierarchy procedure (AHP) and quantifier-guided OWA operators in an ArcGIS 9.2 environment. The FLOWA module proved to be highly flexible and efficient in generating and visualising a wide range of different multi-criteria decision strategies.

Minimizing the ecological impact of land development is a fundamental principle of sustainable development. Ecological suitability assessment is the key to realizing sustainability and is also significant for optimizing spatial patterns of territorial development. Especially in mountainous areas where the ecosystem is both vulnerable and important, quantitative evaluation of ecological suitability for land development is particularly important and urgent given current development strategy of urban construction in mountainous areas in China.

The security district of Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Mardin and Sirnak province located along southern boundary lies between Turkey and Syria that comprised wide areas. It is considered to evaluate of cleaned mined land with a 300-400 m width and 510 m length. It was estimated that these lands were very productive and that can be used for organic or other types of agriculture .If these lands are cleaned and opened to agriculture, that can create jop opportunities to many families in agriculture.

Due to constant decrease in farmlands, it is important to identify the best lands useful for sustainable agriculture (productive and profitable agriculture that protects the environment and that is socially equitable). This requirement has resulted in the development of land suitability maps for agriculture by combining several factors of various natures and of differing importance.