Land use controls may have positive, negative or neutral impact on urban land values. The Offinso South Municipality (OSM) employs conventional zoning in its land management practices. This article investigates the land use control regime in and its impact on land values and the living standards of residents of the municipality. Empirical data were obtained from physical developers in the municipality via self-administered questionnaire. It also collected data from occupiers of amenity lands via guided interviews.

Conservation covenants have become a popular tool to protect land in perpetuity. Understanding the impact of a covenant on price and enrolment in a conservation programme can help decision makers plan their interventions more carefully, and judge whether the extra longevity justifies the changed participation rate and cost. This paper uses the case study of a conservation auction in Queensland, Australia, to investigate the influence of a compulsory conservation covenant on bid price and participation.

We studied potential denitrification activity and the underlying denitrifier communities in soils from a semiarid savanna ecosystem of the Kavango region in NE Namibia to help in predicting future changes in N₂O emissions due to continuing changes of land use in this region. Soil type and land use (pristine, fallow, and cultivated soils) influenced physicochemical characteristics of the soils that are relevant to denitrification activity and N₂O fluxes from soils and affected potential denitrification activity.

We examine the predictive ability of habitat-species relationship models in island semi-desert environments using as model species the Canary Islands stonechat (Saxicola dacotiae), an endemic bird inhabiting the arid island of Fuerteventura. We investigated nest site selection and the effects of land use on its distribution in a multi-scale approach using nest positions obtained during three consecutive breeding seasons.

The European Landscape Convention is the first international agreement to deal with all aspects of landscape planning, protection, and management. It emphasizes transparency, democracy, and good governance as integral parts of ‘landscape’. The ELC may inspire member states of the Council of Europe to develop better tools for planning land use and the environment; however its utility in practice is still largely untested. This article considers the relevance of the ELC to a major land use conflict in Europe today: the development of wind power.

Many reports have noted that a significant portion of coastal science that is funded to help society address resource management issues does not actually link to decisions. A few studies and reports have offered valuable but general advice on what the funders of this science can do to better link science with decisions; there are fewer still published empirical case studies assessing the impacts of innovative funder methods for getting more science used by intended audiences.

Human activities are radically changing natural land cover and increasing the delivery of soil, organic compounds, nutrients, toxic agrochemicals and other contaminants to aquatic ecosystems. The eutrophication of streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs and costal zones is one of the most important consequences of human activities. In this study we assessed the trophic status of 28 wadeable stream reaches of the Santa Lucía basin, an important economic region of Uruguay. We developed a Trophic State Index of Benthic Invertebrates (TSI-BI), the first of its kind for South American lotic systems.

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has become a major source of water pollution. A combination of models would provide the necessary direction and approaches designed to control NPS pollution through land use planning. In this study, NPS pollution load was simulated in urban planning, historic trends and ecological protection land use scenarios based on the Conversion of Land Use and its Effect at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models applied to Hunhe-Taizi River Watershed, Liaoning Province, China.

Carbonate aquifers constitute a water reserve of essential importance for human supply. For this, it is necessary to establish suitable protection measures in order to achieve the good status of groundwater bodies intended for human supply according to the requirements of the Water Framework Directive.

Surface runoff and soil loss from 2007 to 2010 related to land use and rainfall regimes in karst hill slopes in Guizhou Province, southwest China, were analyzed. Using the hierarchical clustering method, sixty-one rainfall events under the subtropical monsoon climate condition were classified into 5 types of rainfall regimes according to the depth, maximum 30-min intensity, and duration of rainfall.

Prioritizing land units for environmental management and planning is central in any process aiming at the improvement of urban and environmental conditions. In this study, an algebraic method (lattice theory) was applied to data describing the characteristics of ten land units of a landscape of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Consequently, landscape complexity was modeled and land units were prioritized for land management.

GIS-RS techniques offer great potential for providing insights into the spatiality and temporality of the messy realties of deforestation. However, rather than positing that the land use maps produced using these novel technologies can cut through politics, it is argued that the map is merely an artifact of the broader process of land use planning which is constitutive of politics. This article critically reflects on a major land use mapping exercise that the two authors were involved with, in central Cambodia.