The beginning of the restitutional land reallocation reform in 1991 brought a rapid change in agricultural land utilisation and user groups resulting in the decrease of state land users’ categories and the growth of private agricultural land areas used by farmers and other natural and legal entities. The aim of the article is to analyse the stability of farmers farms and their agricultural areas in Lithuania during the period between 2009 and 2014.

Observational studies of diversity have consistently found positive correlations between native and exotic species, suggesting that the same environmental factors that drive native species richness also drive exotic species richness, i.e., “the rich get richer”. We examined patterns of native and exotic plant species richness in temperate forests that have been undergoing reforestation since the turn of the twentieth century to test the influence of disturbance arising from land-use history on this relationship.

Spanish mountains have been affected by the expansion of shrubs and forests since the mid‐20th century. This secondary succession in vegetation has some positive effects, but also drawbacks, such as an increase in fire risk, loss of diversity in land use, a reduction in landscape and cultural value, less water available in river channels and reservoirs, constraints on livestock farming, a reduced number of local species and loss of biodiversity.

The West African savannas are subject to changes in fire regimes related to land use intensification, which may infer significant biological modifications. We investigated the efficiency of MODIS fire products to account for the variability of fire regimes in relation to changes in land cover and savanna vegetation. The specificity and complementarities of both MODIS active fire (MOD14A2 and MYD14A2) and burnt area (MCD45A1) products were assessed in order to characterize fire regimes and to relate them with land cover.

Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images were used to assess the urban expansion dynamics and the corresponding thermal characteristics in Shenyang City, China. Unsupervised classification (ISODATA) and a hierarchy decision tree were applied to eight scenes of the Landsat images to derive the land use/land cover (LULC) around the Shenyang metropolitan region from 1986 to 2007.

The effect of topographic characteristics of land uses on stream water quality must be addressed for a better understanding of the complex relationship between land use and stream water quality. In this study, Geographic Information System (GIS) and Pearson correlation analysis were used to determine whether there were relationship between land use types and stream water quality at the sub-basin scale in the Wei River basin, China, during the dry and rainy seasons in 2012.

Investment in natural capital restoration is increasing as a response to the widespread ecological degradation of dryland forests. However, finding efficient mechanisms to promote restoration among private landowners is a significant challenge for policy makers with limited financial resources. Furthermore, few attempts have been made to evaluate the costs and benefits of restoration interventions even though this information is relevant to orient decision making.

The Scops Owl Otus scops (L., 1758) is a species of European concern, which suffered a noticeable decrease in distribution in the last decades, and changes in agricultural practices have been proposed as a major threat for this owl. We studied the habitat preference of the Scops Owl by assessing the habitat occupancy of 401 territories distributed in a large area in northwest Italy, with a special focus on 98 territories located in a high-density area (Monferrato).

The paper investigates spatial changes in cultivation and land use of wheat, maize and oilseedin Hungarian agriculture using different methods to measure these changes. The results suggestthat spatial structure of crop productions has remained fairly stable during analysed period. Thespatial concentration increased significantly for wheat and maize production and maize landuse, whilst the changes were not significant for other cases. Estimates confirm the presence ofspatial autocorrelation for all cases.

Land cover derived from remotely sensed products is an important input to a number of different global, regional and national scale applications including resource assessments and economic land use models. During the last decade three global land cover datasets have been created, i.e. the GLC-2000, MODIS and GlobCover, but comparison studies have shown that there are large spatial discrepancies between these three products. One of the reasons for these discrepancies is the lack of sufficient in-situ data for the development of these products.