Changes in landscape composition and structure may impact the conservation and management of protected areas. Species that depend on specific habitats are at risk of extinction when these habitats are degraded or lost. Designing robust methods to evaluate landscape composition will assist decision- and policy-making in emerging landscapes. This paper describes a rapid assessment methodology aimed at evaluating land-cover quality for birds, plants, butterflies and bees around seven UK Natura 2000 sites.

The specificity and uniqueness of land as a land appraisal object are disclosed. Principles of land appraisal are considered, their interrelation and dependence on land use features are shown.

Розкрито специфіку і унікальність землі як обєкта оцінки. Розглянуті принципи оцінки земельних ділянок, показаний їх взаємозвязок і залежність від особливостей використання землі.

Forests play an important role in the community’s livelihood, and this role has created an important relationship or mutual dependence between the forest and the community. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify the types of community’s forest dependency and to identify the effects of community’s forest dependency towards forest resources and wildlife abundance. The data were collected using the self-administered questionnaire, involving 204 community members in Bau District, Sarawak.

This study provides a spatially comprehensive assessment of sustainable agricultural residue removal potential across the United States for bioenergy production. Earlier assessments determining the quantity of agricultural residue that could be sustainably removed for bioenergy production at the regional and national scale faced a number of computational limitations. These limitations included the number of environmental factors, the number of land management scenarios, and the spatial fidelity and spatial extent of the assessment.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there were presented theoretical statements and methodical approaches to the improvement of the use of lands and organization of the territory of agricultural organizations in conditions of ecologization of land use. There were formulated the notion and tasks of improvement of the use of lands of agricultural organizations.

A key challenge for land change science in general and research on swidden agriculture in particular, is linking land cover information to human-environment interactions over larger spatial areas. In Lao PDR, a country facing rapid and multi-level land change processes, this hinders informed policy- and decision-making. Crucial information on land use types and people involved is still lacking. This article proposes an alternative approach for the description of landscape mosaics.

This study gives an account of the implementation of a decision support system as a logical framework for assessing lake pollution hazard. The use of this system is demonstrated with an example from two lake watersheds, each one with different land-use, soil and topographic characteristics and also management regulations for natural resource protection. Lake pollution hazard is assessed as a function of two primary topics: hydrologic and soil conditions.

Human activities influence the biodiversity of Mediterranean ecosystems and are involved in the transformation of natural habitats into farmland. We surveyed birds using the point count method on 288 plots at a 50-m radius in three altitudinal landscapes with different rural character in spring and autumn. The results showed that bird species richness in the study area was high (74 species). High total species richness was found in the upland rural landscape characterized by mixed land use and high landscape diversity.

PURPOSE: Livestock already use most global agricultural land, whereas the demand for animal-source food (ASF) is expected to increase. To address the contribution of livestock to global food supply, we need a measure for land use efficiency of livestock systems. METHODS: Existing measures capture different aspects of the debate about land use efficiency of livestock systems, such as plant productivity and the efficiency of converting feed, especially human-inedible feed, into animal products. So far, the suitability of land for cultivation of food crops has not been accounted for.

The ecological integrity of lotic ecosystems is intimately linked to the quality of their catchments. Environmental protection efforts should therefore be implemented at the relevant catchment-scale in order to support river biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Therefore, freshwater management can greatly benefit from tools that enable spatially-explicit predictions of water quality across heterogeneous landscapes.

The Huajiang and Hongfenghu demonstration areas represent typical karst landforms and rocky desertification landscapes in Guizhou, China. These were selected for a comparison of rocky desertification and land use cover. Based mainly on 5� m resolution Spot 5, remote sensing images, topographic maps (1:10,000) and land use maps, the intensity and extent of rocky desertification, and slope characteristics of the two areas were interpreted. Spatial overlay analysis was used to compare the land use/land cover (LULC) and rocky desertification within each.

The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Northern Research Station Forest Inventory and Analysis program (NRS-FIA) uses digital land cover products derived from remotely sensed imagery, such as the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), for the purpose of variance reduction via postsampling stratification. The update cycle of the NLCD product is infrequent; NLCD 2001 was the first update since the release of NLCD 1992, and was not yet fully completed as of late 2006.