We assessed bird diversity and nesting activity in 54 urban parks in the core of a highly populated East-Asian tropical city to investigate the effects of area, isolation, habitat heterogeneity, and human disturbances on avifauna. Tree density and heterogeneity were lower while isolation was greater in small than in large or medium-sized parks.

There is increasing interest in Zimbabwe in developing a biofuels industry based on the production of biodiesel using Jatropha as the main feedstock. This has led to the introduction of Jatropha as a commercial energy crop in the country. There are plans to grow 1220 km2 of Jatropha which will supply about 365,000 t of seed. This will provide about 110 dam3 of biodiesel required to achieve a blending level of 10% with petro-diesel.

Agricultural non-point source pollution (ANSP) is considered a major contributor to local water degradation in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) of China. The Xiangxi River, which is a first level anabranch of the Yangtze River, was selected for investigation of the effectiveness of selected best management measures (BMPs) to alleviate water pollution through analysis of several scenarios by SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool).

Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context.

This article aims to explain and demonstrate the origin and development of a subsidence basin caused by coal mining as well as to point out important aspects of this phenomenon in engineering geology. Engineering geology needs to deal with a number of issues related to the origin and development of subsidence basins in areas affected by deep coal mining. An interesting case study from the Upper-Silesian Basin in the northeast of the Czech Republic near the Polish border is presented in this paper.

Intra-aggregate pores play an important role in controlling soil processes on a micro-scale. Differences in parent materials, pedogenic processes, land use, and management practices can have a substantial effect on their characteristics. The goal of this study is to examine intra-aggregate pore characteristics using X-ray computed microtomography (μCT) images in soils of two contrasting parent materials and of contrasting land use and management.

Woody biomass production is a critical indicator in evaluation of land use management and the dynamics of the global carbon cycle (sequestration/emission) in terrestrial ecosystems. The objective of the present study was to develop, through a case study in Sudan, an operational multiscale remote-sensing-based methodology for large-scale estimation of woody biomass in tropical savannahs. Woody biomass estimation models obtained by different authors from destructive field measurements in different tropical savannah ecosystems were expressed as functions of tree canopy cover (CC).

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.

Today, competing land use is continuing to occur in many developed regions. In the Agricultural Development Zone of Western Sydney Region, which is characterised by complex landscape patterns, land use competition is widespread. From a land use planning perspective, identification of suitable locations for a given type of land use is necessary for decision makers to formulate land use alternatives in different locations, based on existing land potential and constraints.