Urban trees can potentially mitigate environmental degradation accompanying rapid urbanisation via a range of tree benefits and services. But uncertainty exists about the extent of tree benefits and services because urban trees also impose costs (e.g. asthma) and may create hazards (e.g. windthrow). Few researchers have systematically assessed how urban tree benefits and costs vary across different cities, geographic scales and climates.

Planners have long been interested in understanding ways in which land use planning approaches play out on the ground and planning scholars have approached the task of evaluating such effects using a variety of methods. Oregon, in particular, has been the focus of numerous studies owing to its early-adopted and widely recognized statewide approach to farm and forest land protection and recent experiment with relaxation of that approach in 2004 with the passage of ballot Measure 37.

Knowing the influence of land use/land cover changes on the hydrological behavior of a subwatershed is essential to land use planning. The Alto Paraguaçu Watershed is a major producer of fruits and vegetables, and currently the largest producer of English potato in the north/northeast of Brazil. The water availability in the region can be considered the limiting factor to the expansion of agricultural frontiers.

The aim of this paper is to outline current foundations for sustainable landscape management in the Vilhelmina Model Forest, northwest Sweden. A case study revealed that the remaining patches of undisturbed or less disturbed boreal forest ecosystems comprise multiple values and, thus, constitute the basis for landscape planning. By identifying these patches, it is also possible to construct a spatial planning infrastructure for implementing sustainable management and land use.

Regarding increasing pressures by global societal and climate change, the assessment of the impact of land use and land management practices on land degradation and the related decrease in sustainable provision of ecosystem services gains increasing interest. Existing approaches to assess agricultural practices focus on the assessment of single crops or statistical data because spatially explicit information on practically applied crop rotations is mostly not available.

The project commissioned by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) aimed to examine the degree to which UK, mainly English local planning authorities, incorporate health in their land use plans and development decisions. The project involved systematic reviews of evidence together with case studies. The range of performance in relation to health identified in the project shows that best practice in England depends not so much on the planning system per se, as on the leadership, commitment and knowledge of politicians and practitioners involved.

The spring waters of Tuzla-Icmeler are on the Marmara Sea coast in Tuzla town of Istanbul city. The springs discharge a natural sodium chloride mineral water that consumed for ages for therapeutic purposes attributed to their chemical properties. Development of springs commenced during the Ottoman times and a surface collection structure was built at the discharge point of the main spring. Two deep wells were drilled to tap mineral water within the past decades. The bottled water of these springs is also sold for a couple of years and its consumption as a beverage is increasing.

Landscape metrics are used in landscape ecology to quantify landscape characteristics related to structure, function and change by quantifying the structure and distributional pattern of landscape elements such as plants, animals and other physical landscape features. To date, there has been little published research on landscape metrics that include social perceptions of landscape. In this paper, we introduce the concept of social landscape metrics that quantify human perceptions of place resulting from the use of public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS).

In Mongolia, nomadic herders have successfully been grazing livestock for more than a millennium. However, in recent years, concerns have increased that changes in management and higher livestock stocking rates may negatively affect vegetation and increase soil erosion, overland flow and sediment load of rivers. In addition, ambitious agricultural policies increase the intensity of agricultural land use thus enforcing a conversion of grassland to agricultural land which is far more susceptible to erosion.

Landscape: stake and tool for land use planning. For last decades, landscape has gradually become a stake of land use planning in Europe. The European Landscape Convention formalizes landscape as an issue of general interest and promotes a democratic landscape planning. However, landscape is rarely in practice the subject of pluridisciplinary and concerted approaches. So land use planning searches for a landscape concept able to gather together the various disciplinary and societal points of view. This federative concept can help it to build concerted policies of landscape planning.

This study presents a modeling tool to assess emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) from the agricultural sector as affected by land-use and residue utilization options. The overall purpose of this tool is twofold: (i) a spreadsheet model for comprehensive compilation of the direct and indirect emissions from land management, residue-burning and fossil fuel consumption through on-farm and off-farm operations and (ii) a decision support tool to explore economically viable mitigation options through detailed cost-benefit analysis of different technological options.

New tools for land use analysis including detailed cost-benefit assessments are needed to integrate resource management for enhancing farmers' income and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The paper comprises an assessment of GHG emissions and economic returns under different mitigation technologies in three rice growing regions in Asia, i.e., Ilocos Norte province (Philippines), Zhejiang province (China) and Haryana state (India).