Mangroves in Kenya provide a wide range of valuable services to coastal communities despite their relatively small total area. Studies at single sites show reductions in extent and quality caused by extraction for fuel wood and timber and clearance for alternative land use including saltpans, aquaculture, and tourism. Such studies suggest that Kenyan mangroves are likely to conform to the general global trend of declining area but there are no reliable recent estimates of either total mangrove extent or trends in coverage for the country.

Understanding the relationships between biodiversity and land-use is a key element for the development of effective conservation strategies. We studied a mid-altitude steppe-like area of Southern France, the Causse de Sauveterre, that has been grazed for many centuries. The decrease of human population during the 20th century, particularly since the end of 2nd World War, and the ongoing changes in agricultural practices may have dramatic effects on many biodiversity components of these landscapes.

As in many other developing countries, cities in Bangladesh have witnessed rapid urbanization, resulting in increasing amounts of land being taken over and therefore land cover changing at a faster rate. Until now, however, few efforts have been made to document the impact of land use and land cover changes on the climate, environment, and ecosystem of the country because of a lack of geospatial data and time-series information.

We suggest a classificatory approach for land cover analysis that integrates fuzzy set theory with permutation techniques. It represents a non parametric alternative and/or a complement of traditional multivariate statistics when data are scarce, missing, burdened with high degree of uncertainty and originated from different sources and/or times. According to this approach, the Operational Geographic Units (OGUs) in which landscape is subdivided and sampled are classified with hierarchical clustering methods.

The beginning of the restitutional land reallocation reform in 1991 brought a rapid change in agricultural land utilisation and user groups resulting in the decrease of state land users’ categories and the growth of private agricultural land areas used by farmers and other natural and legal entities. The aim of the article is to analyse the stability of farmers farms and their agricultural areas in Lithuania during the period between 2009 and 2014.

Widespread and increasing urbanization has resulted in the need to assess, monitor, and understand its effects on stream water quality. Identifying relations between stream ecological condition and urban intensity indicators such as impervious surface provides important, but insufficient information to effectively address planning and management needs in such areas.

Since China's economic reform in the late 1970s, Shanghai, the country's largest and most modern city, has experienced rapid expansion and urbanization. Here, we explore its land‐use and land‐cover changes, focusing on the impacts of the urbanization process on air and water quality, local climate, and biodiversity. Over the past 30 years, Shanghai's urban area and green land (eg urban parks, street trees, lawns) have increased dramatically, at the expense of cropland.

Lidar and orthophotograph-derived land cover are combined with in situ vegetation measurements to assess habitat characteristics typifying four species of butterflies with differing habitat preferences across a large spatial extent (∼30,000 ha) in northern Idaho, USA. Lidar data are employed to characterize both vegetation structure and topography, whereas digital orthophotographs and in situ vegetation measurements are employed to quantify surrounding land use and larval host plant cover, respectively.

Residents, developers and civic officials are often faced with difficult decisions about appropriate land uses in and around metropolitan boundaries. Urban expansion brings with it the potential for negative environmental impacts, but there are alternatives, such as conservation subdivision design (CSD) or low-impact development (LID), which offer the possibility of mitigating some of these effects at the development site.

Human activities as well as natural events can dramatically affect land degradation negatively or positively. In Egypt, agriculture is a key sector of the economy. Land reclamation seeks to transfer desert areas to agricultural land and support the construction of new villages. The agricultural productivity improvement of these Newlands is slow and requires considerable time due to their fragility and sensitivity to desertification.

Increasing dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in lakes, rivers and streams in northern mid latitudes have been widely reported during the last two decades, but relatively few studies have dealt with trends in DOC export. We studied the export of DOC from Finnish rivers to the Baltic Sea between 1975 and 2010, and estimated trends in DOC fluxes (both flow normalised and non-normalised). The study encompassed the whole Finnish Baltic Sea catchment area (301,000km²) covering major land use patterns in the boreal zone.

Hydrologic data from agricultural watersheds are necessary to identify long-term trends and to develop and validate hydrologic and water quality models. These types of data have been collected for 70 yr at the North Appalachian Experimental Watershed (NAEW) near Coshocton, OH. The NAEW has 19 small (0.5–3.0-ha), single-land-use watersheds for which surface runoff data have been collected year round on an event basis for various time periods since 1939. There are six large (17–123-ha), mixed-use watersheds with perennial streams where flow is measured continuously.