Agro-pastoral decline in European mountain areas has recently caused changes to traditional landscapes with negative consequences on semi-natural grassland conservation and the associated biodiversity and ecosystem services. In the Italian Alps, grassland patches enclosed in a forest matrix are progressively disappearing. Two alpine valleys (Pesio and Pejo), having similar land-use history, were chosen as representative of management conditions of western and eastern Italian Alps, respectively.

The rapid urban development in the Hurghada area since the 1980s has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of human activities. To inventory and monitor this urban development effectively, remote sensing provides a viable source of data from which updated land cover information can be extracted efficiently and cheaply.

The rapid growth of urban population in India is a cause of concern among country’s urban and town planners for efficient urban planning. The drastic growth of urban areas has resulted in sharp land use and land cover changes. In recent years, the significance of spatial data technologies, especially the application of remotely sensed data and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used. The present study investigates the urban growth of Tiruchirapalli city, Tamilnadu using IRS satellite data for the years 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010.

In the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia gully occurrence is linked to poverty-driven unsustainable use of the land in a vulnerable semi-arid and mountainous environment, where intensive rainfall challenges the physical integrity of the landscape. Trends in gully and river channel erosion, and their relation to triggering environmental changes can proffer valuable insights into sustainable development in Northern Ethiopia.

Small blanket bog lakes can contain many rare and threatened aquatic invertebrate species. Their conservation value, however, is threatened throughout Europe by peat extraction and particularly conifer afforestation, which can compromise the physico-chemical habitat quality of peatland lakes through excessive inputs of forestry-derived dissolved and particulate substances.

Northeast Asia is an area with relative concentrations of resources, a complex ecological environment pattern, and a marked human—land contrast relationship. This area has significance for analyzing land cover patterns and variations for regional sustainable development among the trans-boundary areas of China, Russia, and Mongolia. In this paper, the transect analysis research tool and transfer matrix method are used to capture the regional land cover change characteristics by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) datasets recorded from 2001 to 2012.

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Annex I countries that are Parties to the Climate Change Convention provide annual greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory submissions including GHG data for the land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sector. For many countries, carbon sequestration – especially in Forest Land-offsets a significant proportion of national emissions both an-nually and overtime.

The southeastern USA is home to one of the richest—and most imperiled and threatened—freshwater fish assemblages in North America. For many of these rare and threatened species, conservation efforts are often limited by a lack of data. Drawing on a unique and extensive data set spanning over 20 years, we modeled occurrence probabilities of 126 stream fish species sampled throughout North Carolina, many of which occur more broadly in the southeastern USA.

Scholars of pastoralism often refer to changes of pastoral land tenure as ‘encroachment.’ The New Zealand case of pastoral land tenure reform suggests that this is incorrect for several reasons. First it takes the point of view of the pastoralist, which introduces unnecessary bias. Second, it assumes that all changes in land tenure are situations in which the state, or another powerful agent, takes land away from the less powerful pastoralists.

PURPOSE: To assess the diverse environmental impacts of land use, a standardization of quantifying land use elementary flows is needed in life cycle assessment (LCA). The purpose of this paper is to propose how to standardize the land use classification and how to regionalize land use elementary flows. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In life cycle inventories, land occupation and transformation are elementary flows providing relevant information on the type and location of land use for land use impact assessment.