Land use/cover change (LUCC) is often the cumulative result of individual farmer's decisions. To understand and simulate LUCC as the result of local decisions, multi-agent systems models (MAS) have become a popular technique. However, the definition of agents is not often based on real data, ignoring the inherent diversity of farmers and farm characteristics in rural landscapes. The aim of this paper is to describe an empirical method that defines an agent typology and allocates agents into the different agent types for an entire region.

The increase of coastal problems as a result of rapid developments and changes brought new planning and management needs into the agenda. The Integrated Coastal Area Management (ICAM) concept developed under the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) includes solutions towards the sustainable use of coastal areas in the Mediterranean Region. Antalya is the province of Turkey with the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Sea. Side- Manavgat coasts of the province are privileged areas with their natural beaches, sand dune forests, rivers and natural and historical relic sites.

Forestry plantations represent about 4� % of the global land cover and demand for wood is steadily increasing worldwide. Impacts of forest plantations on biodiversity are controversial; forest plantations could positively influence biodiversity by producing a buffer zone between native forests and agriculture, while replacement of native forests with plantations could reduce biodiversity. Chile is one of the main producers of wood worldwide, and production is largely based on intensively managed monocultures of exotic tree species.

Over the past 60 years, China's ancient agricultural village landscapes have been transformed by unprecedented changes in rural policy, population and agricultural technology. The village landscapes of China's Yangtze Plain are among the most ancient, densely populated and intensively managed in the world and have undergone extremely rapid development in recent decades, causing the wholesale transformation of traditional village landscape structure, primarily at fine spatial scales (

This study compiles the latest regional topographic data from field investigation and remote-sensing images to recalculate parameters of the universal soil loss equation (USLE) model of the Shenmu watershed; also to compensate for reduced accuracy of this model on small-scale slopes, this study incorporates soil erosion pin data which were collected periodically to measure the extent of soil erosion.

The fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) absorbed by a vegetation canopy is an important variable for global vegetation modelling and is operationally available from data of the Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite sensor starting from the year 2000. Product validation is ongoing and important for constant product improvement, but few studies have investigated the specific accuracy of MODIS FPAR using in situ measurements and none have focused on agricultural areas.

This study investigated the role that a public land grazing permit buyout would have on ranching operations and conserving private land open space in the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States. Loss of grazing permits could serve as a pivotal factor in expediting private land fragmentation if ranching operations are enticed to sell their land due to loss of economic viability.

Current spatially explicit approaches to map and assess ecosystem services are often grounded on unreliable proxy data based on land use/cover to derive ecosystem service indicators. These approaches fail to make a distinction between the actual service provision and the underlying ecosystem capacity to provide the service. We present an integrative conceptual framework to estimate the provision of soil erosion prevention by combining the structural impact of soil erosion and the social–ecological processes that allow for its mitigation.

Riparian systems have become increasingly susceptible to both natural and human disturbances as cumulative pressures from changing land use and climate alter the hydrological regimes. This article introduces a landscape dynamics monitoring protocol that incorporates riparian structural classes into the land-cover classification scheme and examines riparian change within the context of surrounding land-cover change.

The article summarizes the land relations in the Baltic countries: the features of the land policy, lands' relationships and land use planning in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the XVII-XIX centuries.

Land use and land cover change, perhaps the most significant anthropogenic disturbance to the environment, mainly due to rapid urbanization/industrialization and large scale agricultural activities. In this paper, an attempt has been made to appraise land use/land cover changes over a century (1914–2007) in the Neyyar River Basin (L=56 km; Area = 483.4 km²) in southern Kerala – a biodiversity hot spot in Peninsular India.

In the present work a computation of wind shear coefficients (WSCs) based on 1-h measured wind data has been performed by three stations located over coastal sites in Southern Italy, i.e., Brindisi (BR), Portoscuso (PS) and Termini Imerese (TI). Wind observations have been collected through a 6-year period (January 1, 1997 to December 31, 2002) by wind mast recording at the same two sensor heights (i.e., 10 and 50m AGL), thus enabling a proper wind profile analysis. WSC overall mean values were found to be 0.271 at BR, 0.232 at PS, and 0.150 at TI.