China is a developing country plagued by a long-term and large-scale desertification, which causes serious environmental problems. At the same time, China also has a long history of fighting desertification, especially in the recent decades. Thus, we think China's experience and lessons may be very important and useful for other developing countries to promote the degradation mitigation and life improvement.

En los últimos años han sido incuantificables las aplicaciones que se han llevado a cabo mediante la utilización de las denominadas Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica, bien a través del empleo de los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), bien mediante el manejo y el análisis de imágenes de satélite (Teledetección), o bien mediante la aplicación de técnicas estadísticas de análisis multivariantes.

Extensive economic growth, tourism activities and over-exploitation of resources have become the common causes of environmental degradation in Langkawi. The sudden development leap resulting from UNESCO's recognition of Langkawi Archipelago as a Global Geopark in 2007, leads to continuous conflicts between enhancing environmental protection and meeting tourism and development needs.

Erosion can have a significant impact on soil properties in areas characterized by undulating topography. The spatial trends of soil properties and the availability of soil nutrients change with land use conversion. Most studies on these changes in China, however, focus on the natural or agricultural ecosystems. Little attention has been paid to unique changes, such as the conversion of natural or agricultural land to economic development zones.

Land use change is the most pervasive force driving the degradation of watershed ecosystems. This article combines an econometric model of land use choice with models of watershed health indicators to examine the effects of land use policies on watershed ecosystems through their effect on land use. Our results suggest that incentive-based land use policies and property acquisition programs can have relatively large positive impacts on watershed health, while policies that change the returns to land use are less effective.

Incorporating public or local preferences in landscape planning is often discussed with respect to the difficulties associated with accurate representation, stimulating interest and overcoming barriers to participation. Incorporating sectoral and professional preferences may also have the same degree of difficulty where conflicts can arise. Planning theory calls for inclusiveness and collaboration, ideally egalitarian, and analysis of the process often uses case study scenarios that may offer examples for practice and further research.

This paper presents a spatial framework which can be used to perform multi-criteria assessments for different purposes. We tested the framework on a case study of evaluating potential expansion for irrigated pasture in the Limestone Coast of South Australia. The core of the framework is the fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted averaging (FLOWA) model which integrates and implements fuzzy quantifiers, Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the ArcGIS environment.

A Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to estimate the technically available woody biomass from forests and willow biomass crops within a 40 km radius of Syracuse and Tupper Lake, NY. Land cover and land use data were used to identify the available land base and restrictions were applied for slope, parcel size and designated wetlands. Approximately 222,984 oven-dry tonnes (odt) of forest biomass are technically available annually around Syracuse, from 165,848 hectares (ha) of timberland.

Urban construction land suitability evaluation (UCLSE) is a complex system engineering and the basis for rational use of the limited urban land resources in China. It has an important practical value on urban construction land use planning and management from the angle of methodology. As a widely used technique, traditional multi-criteria evaluation based on GIS (MCE-GIS), is not suitable for UCLSE. This study develops an improved MCE-GIS method which could be more suitable for UCLSE based on urban complex ecological system theory and the summary of the shortcomings of traditional MCE-GIS.