Motor vehicle traffic is an important source of particulate pollution in cities of the developing world, where rapid growth, coupled with a lack of effective transport and land use planning, may result in harmful levels of fine particles (PM₂.₅) in the air. However, a lack of air monitoring data hinders health impact assessments and the development of transportation and land use policies that could reduce health burdens due to outdoor air pollution.

Nutrient mass balances have been used to assess a variety of land resource scenarios, at various scales. They are widely used as a simple basis for policy, planning, and regulatory decisions but it is not clear how accurately they reflect reality. This study provides a critique of broad-scale nutrient mass balances, with particular application to the fertiliser use of beef lot-feeding manure in Queensland.

There is increasing interest in Zimbabwe in developing a biofuels industry based on the production of biodiesel using Jatropha as the main feedstock. This has led to the introduction of Jatropha as a commercial energy crop in the country. There are plans to grow 1220 km2 of Jatropha which will supply about 365,000 t of seed. This will provide about 110 dam3 of biodiesel required to achieve a blending level of 10% with petro-diesel.

Agricultural non-point source pollution (ANSP) is considered a major contributor to local water degradation in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) of China. The Xiangxi River, which is a first level anabranch of the Yangtze River, was selected for investigation of the effectiveness of selected best management measures (BMPs) to alleviate water pollution through analysis of several scenarios by SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool).

Rural areas in densely populated regions face increasing competition for land. Consequently, land use planning processes must attempt to balance the goals of diverse stakeholders and the process of reaching consensus becomes more complicated. By investigating the perception of the actors involved in rural planning, this research contributes to the knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of such processes. We have focused on the case of rural planning processes in Flanders in which proponents of nature and agriculture are competing for land.

We assessed bird diversity and nesting activity in 54 urban parks in the core of a highly populated East-Asian tropical city to investigate the effects of area, isolation, habitat heterogeneity, and human disturbances on avifauna. Tree density and heterogeneity were lower while isolation was greater in small than in large or medium-sized parks.

Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context.

This article aims to explain and demonstrate the origin and development of a subsidence basin caused by coal mining as well as to point out important aspects of this phenomenon in engineering geology. Engineering geology needs to deal with a number of issues related to the origin and development of subsidence basins in areas affected by deep coal mining. An interesting case study from the Upper-Silesian Basin in the northeast of the Czech Republic near the Polish border is presented in this paper.

Intra-aggregate pores play an important role in controlling soil processes on a micro-scale. Differences in parent materials, pedogenic processes, land use, and management practices can have a substantial effect on their characteristics. The goal of this study is to examine intra-aggregate pore characteristics using X-ray computed microtomography (μCT) images in soils of two contrasting parent materials and of contrasting land use and management.