This longitudinal case study of residential development pressure in a village in Glasgow's urban fringe provides detailed insight into the different perspectives of key public, private and community interest groups, and exemplifies the conflict resolution process in this environment in the context of the new post-2006 planning system in Scotland. The paper is organised into six main parts. In part 1 the major actors in the residential development process are identified with specific attention focused on the house-builder and the local planner.

Open space protection is increasingly being used for flood mitigation at the local level. However, little if any empirical research has been conducted on the effectiveness of this land use policy in terms of reducing actual damage caused by floods. Our study addresses this issue by statistically examining the performance of open space dedicated for flood mitigation purposes across a nationally representative sample of local jurisdictions.

Sand dunes encroachment is a challenge that faces land development in North African countries. Movement of these dunes threatens cultivated lands, roads, and urban settlements. Geographic information system (GIS) provides a tool for cartographic modeling of risk of sand dunes encroachment. This study modeled the potential risk of sand dunes encroachment related to their terrain characteristics in the Western Desert of Egypt. The Food and Agricultural Organization's land cover map of Egypt derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper was used to locate the sand dunes bodies.

Decision support to develop viable climate change adaptation strategies for agriculture and regional land use management encompasses a wide range of options and issues. Up to now, only a few suitable tools and methods have existed for farmers and regional stakeholders that support the process of decision-making in this field. The interactive model-based spatial information and decision support system LandCaRe DSS attempts to close the existing methodical gap.

Fish and benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages often provide insight on ecological conditions for guiding management actions. Unfortunately, land use and management legacies can constrain the structure of biotic communities such that they fail to reflect habitat quality.

This article reports on the results of an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of a set of collaborative spatial decision support tools developed to support a land use allocation problem in a peat-meadow polder in the Netherlands. The tools feature spatial multicriteria analysis as the means to make spatially explicit trade-offs between stakeholder objectives in three different ways: as colors on multiple printed maps, qualitatively on a single digital map and quantitatively on a single digital map.

In a context where several sectors of society compete for space, land use types must be carefully designed and spatially allocated to guarantee a sufficient level of relevant ecosystem services (ES) in a territory of interest. In this respect, contemporary land use planning involves multiple, often conflicting objectives and criteria. Consequently, major benefits can be expected from spatial decision support systems (sDSS) designed to deal with complex spatial allocation problems.

In Latin America countries, competition for access to natural resources among different groups has been a major reason for the outburst of violence over the last decades. One of the main aims of the political ecology concerns the understanding of the environmental conditions that can underlies the social conflict among people. Such understanding needs to be based on a detailed investigation of the natural resources of the landscape, mainly the soils.

The delineation and protection of transhumance corridors are increasingly seen as critical to maintaining livestock mobility in agropastoral areas of West Africa by allowing passage through areas of increasing cropping pressure. Understanding the local politics surrounding the mapping and protection of transhumance corridors is important for policy formulation. This study reports the findings of group meetings in nine local districts (communautés rurales) in eastern Senegal about recently mapped corridors.

The USDA initiated the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices at regional and national scales. For this assessment, a sampling and modeling approach is used. This paper provides a technical overview of the modeling approach used in CEAP cropland assessment to estimate the off-site water quality benefits of conservation practices using the Ohio River Basin (ORB) as an example.

Turkey is homeland of the grapevine (Vitis spp.), one of the most important agricultural products in the World. Our country, having the favorable climatic conditions for viticulture, has an important role among the viticulture farming countries of the World. The objective of this study is to determine potential growing areas of grape in Turkey by using Geographic Information Systems techniques based on topographic and climatic factors. It is important to efficiently use of our limited arable lands from the agricultural point of view.

Regular economic activity takes into account ecosystem goods and services that are exchanged for money in the market (e.g. food, fibre, water) but normally ignores more intangible ones left away from market transactions (e.g. soil protection, climate regulation, disturbance control, habitat provision), even in cases when they become irreversibly impaired.