Land abandonment is widespread in the Mediterranean mountains. The impact of agricultural abandonment results in a shift in ecosystem evolution due to changes in soil erosion, but little is known about long-term soil and water losses. This paper uses 11 years of measurements in two paired plots (abandoned vs control) with four subplots to determine how soil and water losses evolved after abandonment within an agricultural parcel. For two years (2004–2005) both plots were under tillage, and after 2006 one plot was abandoned.

Explorations of future land use change are important to understand potential conflicts between competing land uses, trade-offs associated with particular land change trajectories, and the effectiveness of policies to steer land systems into desirable states. Most model-based explorations and scenario studies focused on conversions in broad land use classes, but disregarded changes in land management or focused on individual sectors only.

As a result of high-density urbanization and climate change, both the frequency and intensity of extreme urban rainfall are increasing. Drainage systems are not designed to cope with this increase, and as a result, floods are becoming more common in cities, particularly in the rapidly growing cities of China. To better cope with more frequent and severe urban flooding and to improve the water quality of stormwater runoff, the Chinese government launched the national Sponge City Construction (SCC) program in 2014.

Sustainable economic development is essential for hundreds of millions of poor households in rural areas. This book represents a merger of environmental science and rural development economics. It elucidates the linkage between rational choice theory and theories on land use change. It builds a quantitative framework to connect the environmental method of Material Flow Analysis to basic issues of rural development such as agricultural intensification and food security.

Land use change results from the interaction between the human and the natural system and therefore various scientific disciplines have developed paradigms and methods to study land use change. However, these disciplinary approaches can only cover part of the complex system of land use change. The objective of this dissertation is to develop interdisciplinary methodologies to identify and integrate factors that are important in the land use system to describe and model the land use system in a comprehensive manner.

Riverine nitrogen (N) export is a crucial process that links upstream and downstream ecosystems and coastal zones. However, the driving forces of riverine N export that is closely related to water N pollution are still not well understood. In this study, we used a mass balance approach to quantify the sources of N discharge and analyzed the effect of land use composition on riverine N export, taking Zhejiang Province, China as a case study. We found that the total reactive N discharge to rivers in Zhejiang increased from 0.22 to 0.26 Tg yr-1 from 2000 to 2015.

Abstract Biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems – rivers, lakes and wetlands – is undergoing rapid global decline. Major drivers are land use change, eutrophication, hydrological disturbance, climate change, overexploitation and invasive species. We developed a global model for assessing the dominant human impacts on inland aquatic biodiversity. The system consists of a biodiversity model, named GLOBIO-Aquatic, that is embedded in the IMAGE model framework, i.e.

Few longitudinal studies link agricultural biodiversity, land use and food access in rural landscapes. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that, in a context of economic change, cash crop expansion is associated with deforestation, reduced agrobiodiversity and changes in food access. For this purpose, we analysed data collected from the same 53 upland and floodplain mestizo households in Ucayali, Peru, in 2000 and 2015. We found an emerging transition towards less diversified food access coupled with loss of forest cover and reduced agricultural biodiversity.

Causal explanations of land change are fundamental in land system science, yet existing findings are difficult to synthesize due to the imprecise terminology and the various analytical frameworks they have applied. This paper compares three existing conceptual frameworks, in terms of underlying driving forces and proximate causes, actors, and environmental cognitions, by aligning the relevant elements into a causal chain. We find that the elicitation of environmental cognitions helps in providing a detailed description of this causal chain.

Context: Hedgerows are typical landscape features of high environmental and cultural value that often have been sacrificed for agricultural intensification and scale enlargement. Objectives: We studied the dynamics of hedgerow quality over time in a case study area renowned for its hedgerow landscapes: South West Devon (UK) answering the following research questions: (1) how does the imperative of scale enlargement affect hedgerow quality? and (2) to what extent can cultural landscape degradation be countered by targeted policies?