Habitat banking and tradable development rights (TDR) have gained considerable currency as a way of achieving ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity and of reconciling nature conservation with economic development goals. This paper reviews the use of these instruments for biodiversity conservation and assesses their roles in the policy mix. The two instruments are compared in terms of effectiveness, cost effectiveness, social impact, institutional context and legal requirements.

The ionic composition of water in the vadose zone of the Salt River Valley in south central Arizona was studied for three different water regimes: desert, irrigated, and flooded by urban runoff. The desert area exhibited high salinity in the top 10 m, probably due to concentration of salts over several years. Below 15 m, the salinity decreased with depth and approached the salinity of the native ground water. For the irrigated area, the chemical composition of the soil water was similar to that of the applied water but concentrations were higher.

While edge microclimates are well described for closed forests, they remain under-examined in more sparse vegetation types like the temperate woodlands of south-eastern Australia. This limits predictions of edge effects on remnant vegetation in cleared agricultural landscapes, and of changes in these effects with reforestation.

An area suitability assessment for crop production requires a considerable effort, which can provide necessary information for optimum land use. Agricultural land use has benefited significantly from the use of suitability systems in recent years.

The ungauged wet semi-arid watershed cluster, Seethagondi, lies in the Adilabad district of Telangana in India and is prone to severe erosion and water scarcity. The runoff and soil loss data at watershed, catchment, and field level are necessary for planning soil and water conservation interventions. In this study, an attempt was made to develop a spatial soil loss estimation model for Seethagondi cluster using RUSLE coupled with ARCGIS and was used to estimate the soil loss spatially and temporally.

SUMMARYThis study analyses spatio-temporal patterns of wildfires in Greece using a multidimensional statistical framework based on non-parametric correlations, principal component analysis, clustering and stepwise discriminant analysis. Specifically, we assess the frequency, seasonal profile, severity and land-use type of 135 178 wildfires which occurred between 2000–2012 in Greece, one of the countries most affected by fire in Europe.

The German Remote Sensing Data Center operates the Biosphere Energy Transfer Hydrology Model, a process model that estimates the net primary productivity of agricultural areas. The model is driven by remote sensing data and meteorological data. Remotely sensed datasets including a time series of the leaf area index, which describes vegetation condition, and a land cover classification, which provides information about land use, are needed. Currently leaf area indices and land cover data derived from the sensor vegetation are used.

This study evaluates how urban residents value variety, spatial configuration, and patterns of open space in their neighborhoods. Quantitative matrices that were borrowed from landscape ecology were first used to measure the variety and spatial arrangement of open space plots and landuses around houses. Amenity values of those measures were then evaluated in a hedonic regression that was corrected for identification problem caused by the endogeneity of landuse variables.

This paper describes the spatiotemporal changes pertaining to land use land cover (LULC) and the driving forces behind these changes in Doodhganga watershed of Jhelum Basin. An integrated approach utilizing remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) was used to extract information pertaining to LULC change. Multi-date LULC maps were generated by analyzing remotely sensed images of three dates which include LandSat TM 1992, LandSat ETM+ 2001 and IRS LISS-III 2005.

En este artículo se aborda la caracterización ecológica del paisaje de dos Parques Naturales fronterizos: Arribes del Duero (Salamanca, España) y Douro Internacional (Portugal). El trabajo se basa en el método de análisis desarrollado en SISPARES (Sistema de Monitorización de los Paisajes Rurales Españoles) tratándose de una aplicación específica al estudio de espacios fronterizos. Mediante tecnología SIG se fotointerpretaron los tipos de uso y cubierta de unas cuadrículas territoriales previamente seleccionadas.