In the course of a survey we’ve researched private farms of the West-Transdanubian Region in terms of their land area, economic farm size, land use and types of their enterprise.

River ecosystems are driven by linked physical, chemical, and biological subsystems, which operate over different temporal and spatial domains. This complexity increases uncertainty in ecological forecasts, and impedes preparation for the ecological consequences of climate change. We describe a recently developed “multi-modeling” system for ecological forecasting in a 7600 km² watershed in the North American Great Lakes Basin.

Central Asia has experienced drastic socio-economic, geopolitical, and ecological transitions within the last few decades. The USSR collapse in 1991 has led to widespread changes in land cover and land use due to economic and political transformations within the region. Management practices during and after the Soviet era have intensified ecological problems and demands on resources.

Soil erosion is a major global environmental problem that has caused many issues involving land degradation, sedimentation of waterways, ecological degradation, and nonpoint source pollution. Therefore, it is significant to understand the processes of soil erosion and sediment transport along rivers, and this can help identify the erosion prone areas and find potential measures to alleviate the environmental effects.

Protected areas are usually conceived and managed as static entities, although this approach is increasingly viewed as unrealistic given climate change and ecosystem dynamics. The ways in which people use land and/or natural resources within and around protected areas can also shift and evolve temporally but this remains an under-acknowledged challenge for protected area managers. Here we investigate the factors driving a rapid rise in charcoal production within a new, multiple-use protected area in Madagascar, to inform appropriate management responses.

Land cover is considered to have significant influence on the hydrologic response of a river basin. In this study, we assessed how changes in land cover over time affected flood behaviour from 1988 to 2005, in the Upper Ping River Basin, northern Thailand. We correlated the types of land cover with rainfall–runoff behaviour for smaller and larger flood events taking place during this period. To quantify land cover, nine Landsat 5 TM images taken during the dry season (January or February) were obtained and processed to examine inter-annual land cover changes.

The climate warming trend and city growth contribute to the generation of excessive heat in urban areas. This could be reduced by introducing vegetation and open water surfaces in urban design. This study evaluates the cooling efficiency of green and blue infrastructure to reduce urban heat load using a set of idealized case simulations and a real city model application for Vienna. The idealized case simulations show that the cooling effect of green and blue infrastructure is dependent on the building type, time of the day and in case of blue infrastructure, the water temperature.

BACKGROUND: The toxic effects of ultrafine particles (UFP) are a public health concern. However, epidemiological studies on the long term effects of UFP are limited due to lacking exposure models. Given the high spatial variation of UFP, the assignment of exposure levels in epidemiological studies requires a fine spatial scale. The aim of this study was to assess the performance of a short-term measurement protocol used at a large number of locations to derive a land use regression (LUR) model of the spatial variation of UFP in Girona, Spain.

This paper comprises some general issues about the natural and agricultural context in arid and semiarid Mediterranean pastures. We include most of our studies concerning to shrublands characteristics: composition, production and diversity; which have been developed in the oriental sector of Andalusia for more than 20 years. This work is concluded with some personal considerations about the changes in the land uses, mainly due to rural abandonment, and its incidence in the global change.

SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) represents a dynamic catchment modelling application that can be applied to any river basin and used to quantify the impact of land management practices on water quality over a continuous period. The objective of this study is to apply the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to model pathogen transport, simulate management practices affecting water quality and predict pathogen loads in Irish catchments.