Since the late 1970s, transitions in socioeconomic status and new governmental policies have led to drastic changes in agricultural land use types and farm management practices across rural China, such as an increase in the area of land cultivated for cash–crops (e.g. vegetables and orchards) and intensive fertilization and irrigation of this land. How this more intensive management and land use for the more profitable cash crops affects soil nutrients is of great concern for carbon, soil and water quality management.

CONTEXT: Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning underpins the delivery of all ecosystem services and should be accounted for in all decision-making related to the use of natural resources and areas. However, biodiversity and ecosystem services are often inadequately accounted for in land use management decisions. OBJECTIVE: We studied a boreal forest ecosystem by linking citizen-science bird data with detailed information on forest characteristics from airborne laser scanning (ALS).

The main objective of this study is to evaluate and compare the results of evidential belief functions and fuzzy logic models for spatial prediction of landslide hazards in the Hoa Binh province of Vietnam, using geographic information systems. First, a landslide inventory map showing the locations of 118 landslides that have occurred during the last ten years was constructed using data from various sources.

Soil carbon stocks and sequestration have been given a lot of attention recently in the study of terrestrial ecosystems and global climate change. This review focuses on the progress made on the estimation of the soil carbon stocks of China, and the characterization of carbon dynamics of croplands with regard to climate change, and addresses issues on the mineralization of soil organic carbon in relation to greenhouse gas emissions.

Different land‐use affects the organization of mineral soil particles and soil organic components into aggregates and the consequent arrangement of the aggregates will influence essential ecosystem functions. We investigated a continuous rubber plantation (forested), land fallowed for 10 y (fallow), 10‐y continuous arable cropping land and cropped land with top soil removed (TSR) for concentrations of C, N, and P in bulk soil and dry aggregates.

Climate change and land use management practices are major drivers of biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems. To understand and predict resulting changes in community structures, individual-based and spatially explicit population models are a useful tool but require detailed data sets for each species. More generic approaches are thus needed. Here we present a trait-based functional type approach to model savanna birds. The aim of our model is to explore the response of different bird functional types to modifications in habitat structure.

Marginal land provides an alternative potential for food and bioenergy production in the face of limited land resources; however, effective assessment of marginal lands is not well addressed. Concerns over environmental risks, ecosystem services and sustainability for marginal land have been widely raised. The objective of this study was to develop a hierarchical marginal land assessment framework for land use planning and management.

Qingdao is one of the essential growth poles in the process of new-type urbanization in Shandong Province. The study on the relationship between urban expansion and driving factors in this area is representative. This paper examined urban expansion from the perspective of non-urban to urban conversion, detailing an empirical investigation into the spatiotemporal variations and impact factors of urban expansion in Qingdao.

Including a diverse set of stakeholders in collaborative land use planning processes is facilitated by data and maps that communicate and inform an array of possible planning options and potential scenarios of future land use change. In northern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) has engaged stakeholders and the DRC Government to lead a participatory zoning process in the Maringa–Lopori–Wamba (MLW) Landscape.

The changes in water quality caused by grassing of arable land followed by the reduction in the use of fertilisers after 1989 are demonstrated on an example of two tile-drained subcatchments in spring areas in the Sumava Mountains. The original water quality monitoring was performed in the mid-1980s, at the time when the area was used as tile-drained arable land. The monitoring was renewed in 2004 under different, i.e. extensive, land use conditions.