Recently, studies on land consolidation and valuation in farm lands have became more important due to a new soil conservation law (2005, 5403 numbered) and European Union Integration processes in our country. However, each soil group determined by morphometric system in agricultural lands have its own land use and management practices. Description and determination of soil properties are not sufficiently made by considering old soil classification system. Nowadays, Soil Taxonomy preferred by many countries in the world has been used for soil classification.

During the territorial reform of Latvia separate parishes and towns will be merged into larger areas. Therefore it is necessary to consider economical and spatial conditions, which develops historically, in context of new space quality regulations in the European Union countries.

The Dublin SURGE (Soil Urban Geochemistry) Project is Dublin’s first baseline survey of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants in topsoils and is part of a Europe-wide initiative to map urban geochemical baselines in ten cities. 1,058 samples were collected as part of a stratified random sampling programme in the greater Dublin area to give an overview of baseline conditions in the city. Samples were analysed for 31 inorganic elements including heavy metals.

Soil water repellency reduces infiltration capacity, enhancing overland flow and even runoff production, and may produce patchiness in water infiltration at the hillslope scale. Knowledge about hydrophobicity in rangelands of Mediterranean type climate and its relation with vegetation cover and land management is sparse. The objectives of the present work are to determine the degree and spatial occurrence of soil water repellency and to define its relationship with site characteristics, such as soil, vegetation and land management in rangelands of SW Spain.

Conservation efforts often require site or parcel selection strategies that lead to spatially cohesive reserves. Although habitat contiguity is thought to be conducive to the persistence of many sensitive species, availability of funding and suitable land may restrict the extent to which this spatial attribute can be pursued in land management or conservation. Using optimization modeling, we explore the economic and spatial tradeoffs of retaining or restoring grassland habitat in contiguous patches of various sizes near the Chicago metropolitan area.

Eutrophication resulting from nutrient enrichment decreases water quality and harms ecosystem structure and function, and its degree is significantly affected by land use in the catchment. Quantifying the relationship between eutrophication and land use can help effectively manage land use to improve water quality. Previous studies principally utilized land use quantity as an indicator to link water quality parameters, but these studies lacked insight into the impact of land use intensity.

Land use and management, together with soil properties, determine soil organic carbon (SOC) concentration and its stabilization mechanisms. Four soils (0–30 cm depth) were studied in a semi-arid region with different uses and management regimes: two soils with olive cultivation, both under a non-tillage regime and one with a cover crop (OCC) and the other without (ONT); a fluvial terrace soil (FT) with cereal–sunflower–fallow rotation; and an unaltered soil under natural vegetation (oak trees; OT).

Groundwater vulnerability assessment is an important method for groundwater pollution risk assessment. However, vulnerability assessment results rarely consider groundwater pollution concentration. Few quantitative studies consider groundwater pollutant concentration in different hydrogeological conditions. HYDRUS-1D software can simulate different concentrations of pollutants reaching the shallow aquifer under some vadose zone conditions.

To be effective, reserve networks should represent all target species in protected areas that are large enough to ensure species persistence. Given limited resources to set aside protected areas for biodiversity conservation, and competing land uses, a prime consideration for the design of reserve networks is efficiency (the maximum biodiversity represented in a minimum number of sites). However, to be effective, networks may sacrifice efficiency.

This special issue has presented some of the specific findings of the RE-Impact Project which was commissioned and funded by the EuropeAid Cooperation Office from 2007 until its conclusion in 2010. The project aimed to provide impact assessment frameworks and influence relevant policies through direct involvement in bioenergy projects and policy analysis in South Africa, Uganda, India and China. The papers summarised here have covered issues related to Jatropha curcas and forest-based bioenergy in these countries.

Agricultural nonpoint source (NPS) pollution at the Three Gorges reservoir area in China has been increasingly recognized as a threat to aquatic environment in recent years due to the serious eutrophication problem. Adsorbed NPS pollution is one of the major forms of NPS pollution in mountainous regions, the essential of the adsorbed NPS pollution is soil loss. Thus, simple, highly sensitive and continuous methods are required to simulate and quantify sediments yield at watershed scales.