Landscape: stake and tool for land use planning. For last decades, landscape has gradually become a stake of land use planning in Europe. The European Landscape Convention formalizes landscape as an issue of general interest and promotes a democratic landscape planning. However, landscape is rarely in practice the subject of pluridisciplinary and concerted approaches. So land use planning searches for a landscape concept able to gather together the various disciplinary and societal points of view. This federative concept can help it to build concerted policies of landscape planning.

Woody biomass production is a critical indicator in evaluation of land use management and the dynamics of the global carbon cycle (sequestration/emission) in terrestrial ecosystems. The objective of the present study was to develop, through a case study in Sudan, an operational multiscale remote-sensing-based methodology for large-scale estimation of woody biomass in tropical savannahs. Woody biomass estimation models obtained by different authors from destructive field measurements in different tropical savannah ecosystems were expressed as functions of tree canopy cover (CC).

Today, competing land use is continuing to occur in many developed regions. In the Agricultural Development Zone of Western Sydney Region, which is characterised by complex landscape patterns, land use competition is widespread. From a land use planning perspective, identification of suitable locations for a given type of land use is necessary for decision makers to formulate land use alternatives in different locations, based on existing land potential and constraints.

Geographic information system (GIS) technology has become a valuable tool for environmental science professionals. By incorporating GIS into college-level course curricula, agricultural students become better qualified for employment opportunities. We have developed a case study-based laboratory exercise that introduces students to GIS and the Natural Resource Conservation Service soil survey geographic database for evaluating land use issues associated with septic systems.

The Fossa Bradanica in Basilicata (S Italy) is affected by almost 15% permanent Pleistocene and Holocene gullies. In the past decades climate versus land use management have dramatically increase both the soil loss rate and the muddy-flooding frequency. In this paper the impact of global change on soil production rates and erosion/deposition dynamics at medium-time scale (1949–2000) for two permanent gullies (Fosso Lavandaio and Fosso San Teodoro) has been studied.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) redistribution by soil erosion is fundamental to the C cycle and is a key component of global soil C accounting. Widespread conversion of cropland to forest and grassland and the adoption of conservation agriculture (minimum-till and no-till practices) worldwide and particularly in China since 2000, may have reduced wind erosion and increased SOC storage and ‘avoided’ CO2 emission.

The species richness of hedges in an agricultural landscape may be determined by the environment and by the spatial processes which occur in that landscape. Here, we divided the environmental predictors into three groups: site conditions, hedge stand and landscape structure. We determined their independent and joint effects on the richness of four guilds of herbaceous species in 92 hedge stands in a north-Mediterranean intensive agricultural landscape.

The importance of the landscape as a tourism asset is well known, and the significance of perceptions of landscape is increasingly being recognized in policy and planning, in Europe thanks largely to the implementation of the European Landscape Convention. The abandonment of agricultural land is one of the ongoing processes of landscape change that are having a profound impact not only in Norway – the subject of this article – but across Europe.

Kenya is home to many sacred natural sites, including forests, mountains and rivers. Indigenous communities have upheld their role and responsibilities, passed down over centuries by their ancestors as custodians of these places through time. The 5391 hectares in the Nyambene forest in central Kenya is a sacred site to the Ameru people, a community/tribe living on the northeastern slopes of Mt. Kenya. The forest is a resource from which customs, spiritual practices, and governance systems are derived to protect the territory as a whole and maintain its order, integrity and well-being.

Increasingly, the characteristics of nitrogen (N) loading have been recognized to be critical for the maintenance and restoration of water quality in agricultural watersheds, in response to the spread of water eutrophication. This paper estimates N loading and investigates its influencing factors in ten small watersheds variously dominated by forest and agricultural land use types in the subtropics of China, over an observation period of 23–29 months.