Producing adequate food to meet global demand by 2050 is widely recognized as a major challenge, particularly for Africa south of the Sahara, including Tanzania (Godfray et al. 2010; Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012; van Ittersum et al. 2016). Increased price volatility of major food crops (Koning et al. 2008; Lagi et al. 2011) and an abrupt surge in land area devoted to crop production in recent years (Grassini et al. 2013) reflect the powerful forces underpinning this challenge.

Urban populations are expanding rapidly and so are cities. Remote sensing offers a convenient means of monitoring this expansion as it covers a period of 40 years in the case of the LANDSAT satellite. In some parts of the globe, this is probably the only viable means of monitoring due to the lack of other types of data. In order to monitor expansion, first, urban land has to be separated from other land-cover types.

Objective: The global obesity epidemic has been partially attributed to modern environments that encourage inactivity and overeating, yet few studies have examined specific features of the physical neighborhood environment that influence obesity. Using two different measurement methods, this study sought to identify and compare perceived and observed neighborhood indicators of obesity and a high-risk profile of being obese and inactive.

Due to urban growth, some agricultural lands have been replaced by residential, municipal, and industrial areas. In some cases the remaining agricultural land will not have enough water because of transfers from agriculture to M''I (municipal and industrial) users. Therefore, in many places, especially in arid and semi-arid regions, the use of treated wastewater as a reliable source of irrigation water has already been, or will be, considered in the future.

To redress past racial discrepancies in ownership and tenure, the ANC government of South Africa initiated programmes to make land accessible to the previously disadvantaged. A key component of the national land reform programme was the provision of commonage lands to urban municipalities for use by the urban poor. However, there has been no assessment of the contribution that urban commonage makes to previously disadvantaged households.

German nobility took an important role in Livonia, Estonia and Courland territorial development. During from the period 1870-1913 Riga was the largest export port in Russia province with 550 thousand inhabitants. Towns and large rural population difference resulted Latvian strongly developed agriculture, industry and urbanization. Strong turbulence time began with the year 1905, followed by years of war, and finally in 20 years of the 20th century the agrarian land reform ended in Estonia, Livonia and Latvia.

The Zagros region of western Iran has been affected by the recent changes both in amount and in structure of forest cover. We evaluated the influence of several driving forces on forest cover and structure, including socioeconomic (urban and rural population and rural income) and climatic (mean annual rainfall and mean annual temperature) variables. We acquired all time series Landsat images of a study site from 1972 to 2009. The images were classified to produce a land cover map of each year.

As global urban populations grow, green spaces in cities are under increasing pressure to provide urban habitat and perform important ecosystem services. While public natural areas are typically called upon to provide key habitat in cities, green spaces on private property make up large parts of the urban land base and provide important roles for habitat and ecosystem services that support city function. However voluntary strategies for encouraging ecological stewardship on private property in cities are not well studied.

Human-induced soil degradation is a serious and complex environmental challenge in Iran. For a long time, human activities, namely the overuse of land, have been influencing the natural processes on and in soils; therefore, various types of soil degradation can be observed in many parts of the country. The understanding and the consideration of direct and indirect effects of human activities on soils are indispensable for the prediction of the human impact on soil degradation processes.

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass.

Landscapes in urban areas especially in developing countries are under pressure due to increasing population of urban dwellers and un-directed spread of city boundaries. Sound urban environment plays important aesthetic, ecological, cultural, social and engineering roles beneficial to the people. To support better management of vegetated sites, it is necessary to understand the spatial configuration at the landscape scale and changes that have occurred.

The rapid growth of urban population in India is a cause of concern among country’s urban and town planners for efficient urban planning. The drastic growth of urban areas has resulted in sharp land use and land cover changes. In recent years, the significance of spatial data technologies, especially the application of remotely sensed data and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used. The present study investigates the urban growth of Tiruchirapalli city, Tamilnadu using IRS satellite data for the years 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010.