The rapid environmental changes occurring in the Brazilian Amazon due to widespread deforestation have attracted the attention of the scientific community for several decades. A topic of particular interest involves the assessment of the combined impacts of selective logging and forest fires. Forest disturbances by selective logging and forest fires may vary in scale, from local to global changes, mostly related to the increase of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

CONTEXT: The Natura 2000 network is the centerpiece of European nature conservation policy but its effectiveness is challenged by ongoing landscape change. OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to assess landscape connectivity between Natura 2000 sites in the biodiversity-rich western Mediterranean region. METHODS: We used the wood mouse as a focal species with short-range dispersal and obtained genetic data for 393 individuals uniformly distributed between two Natura 2000 sites in SW Portugal.

In response to the needs of local fire managers, we developed a map of wildfire hazard for La Plata County in southwestern Colorado, USA. Our measure of fire hazard had two components: (i) the probability, should fire occur under dry weather conditions, that fire behavior will be extreme, and (ii) the human values that may be lost or damaged if extreme fire behavior occurs. Using a classification approach in a GIS environment, we developed quantitative indices of potential heat release, flame length, and rate of spread for each vegetation type in the County.

Landslides are very common natural problems in the Selangor area of Malaysia due to the improper use of landcover and tropical rainfall. There are many landslide susceptibility analyses such as statistical, bivariate and data mining approaches exist in the literature. This paper presents the use of fuzzy logic relations for landslide susceptibility mapping on part of Selangor area, Malaysia, using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing data.

Hendy and Kerr (2005b) find that an emissions charge on agricultural methane and nitrous oxide of $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent would be likely to reduce New Zealand‘s net land-use related emissions for commitment period one in the order of 3%, with full accounting. The costs per farmer and as a percentage of profit would be very high. This paper considers the regional impacts of such a policy in New Zealand by allocating the emission charge across space according to the location of animals.

Background: Since phenology is a good bio-indicator of temperature the latter is often used in phenological analyses. However, whilst meteorological data are difficult to interpolate from point measurements at the desired resolution, region-wide digital data, e.g.

The growth of 67 young hybrid (Castanea� � coudercii A. Camus) and pure sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) plantations was studied in relation to ground vegetation (GV) and non-site factors such as type of site preparation, weed control (WC), disease-related damage and prior land use. The classification and regression trees procedure was used to analyse the data. Ground vegetation communities accounted for a large amount of variability in the site index (SI) and were found to be useful as predictors of chestnut site quality.

The present study examines the long-term effects of land use/land cover (LULC) changes in Rajasthan state, India on land-atmosphere fluxes and, possibly in precipitation and aerosol loading. By comparing the satellite observations from Landsat MSS (1972–73) and IRS-P6 AWiFS (2006–07) considerable LULC changes are observed, an increase in crop-land and vegetated areas of ∼57% in the eastern and ∼68% in the western Rajasthan.

The performance improvement obtained from the use of trackers in a PV system cannot be separated from the higher requirement of land due to the mutual shadows between generators. Thus, the optimal choice of distances between trackers is a compromise between productivity and land use to minimize the cost of the energy produced by the PV system during its lifetime. This paper develops a method for the estimation and optimization of the cost of energy function.

It has been widely accepted that high land use intensity contributes to sandy desertification in Northern China. However, it is surprising that it is even not easy to find an explicit definition and proper indicator for the term “land use intensity” in the sandy desertification related literatures.

This paper presents an illustrated guide to the identification of non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) preserved in lake-sediment archives from equatorial East Africa. Modern NPPs were recovered from recently deposited surface sediment in 20 small crater lakes in western Uganda, located along environmental gradients of vegetation (moist evergreen and semi-deciduous forest, wooded and open grass savannah), land use (pastoralism, crop agriculture, plantations) and lake characteristics (basin morphometry, water chemistry and aquatic production).