This study investigated the role that a public land grazing permit buyout would have on ranching operations and conserving private land open space in the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States. Loss of grazing permits could serve as a pivotal factor in expediting private land fragmentation if ranching operations are enticed to sell their land due to loss of economic viability.

Current spatially explicit approaches to map and assess ecosystem services are often grounded on unreliable proxy data based on land use/cover to derive ecosystem service indicators. These approaches fail to make a distinction between the actual service provision and the underlying ecosystem capacity to provide the service. We present an integrative conceptual framework to estimate the provision of soil erosion prevention by combining the structural impact of soil erosion and the social–ecological processes that allow for its mitigation.

Riparian systems have become increasingly susceptible to both natural and human disturbances as cumulative pressures from changing land use and climate alter the hydrological regimes. This article introduces a landscape dynamics monitoring protocol that incorporates riparian structural classes into the land-cover classification scheme and examines riparian change within the context of surrounding land-cover change.

The article summarizes the land relations in the Baltic countries: the features of the land policy, lands' relationships and land use planning in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the XVII-XIX centuries.

Land use and land cover change, perhaps the most significant anthropogenic disturbance to the environment, mainly due to rapid urbanization/industrialization and large scale agricultural activities. In this paper, an attempt has been made to appraise land use/land cover changes over a century (1914–2007) in the Neyyar River Basin (L=56 km; Area = 483.4 km²) in southern Kerala – a biodiversity hot spot in Peninsular India.

In the present work a computation of wind shear coefficients (WSCs) based on 1-h measured wind data has been performed by three stations located over coastal sites in Southern Italy, i.e., Brindisi (BR), Portoscuso (PS) and Termini Imerese (TI). Wind observations have been collected through a 6-year period (January 1, 1997 to December 31, 2002) by wind mast recording at the same two sensor heights (i.e., 10 and 50m AGL), thus enabling a proper wind profile analysis. WSC overall mean values were found to be 0.271 at BR, 0.232 at PS, and 0.150 at TI.

Latin American subtropical dry ecosystems have experienced significant human impact for more than a century, mainly in the form of extensive livestock grazing, forest products extraction, and agriculture expansion. We assessed the regional-scale effect of land use and land cover (LULC) on patterns of richness distribution of trees, birds, amphibians, and mammals in the Northern Argentine Dry Chaco (NADC) over c. 19 million hectares. Using species distribution models in a hierarchical framework, we modeled the distributions of 138 species.

Patterns of land-use and land-cover change are usually grouped into one of two categories defined by the dominant trend: (1) deforestation resulting from expanding agriculture and (2) forest expansion, usually related to the abandonment of marginal lands. At regional scale, however, both processes can occur simultaneously even in the absence of net change. Given the focus on net change, such redistribution of agricultural and natural and seminatural lands has been generally overlooked.

Forest use in Sweden may be seen as constituting an essentially conflicted area, in which a number of actors position themselves. Based on a review of policy documents, this study reviews discourses on forest amongst major organisational actors between 2001 and 2011, with the aim of discussing the ways in which discourse may have changed following increasing criticism of the previously dominating production paradigm during the period. The study also discusses the ways in which forest discourses at present may also exclude areas that are relevant to forest planning.

For centuries, pastoralists have influenced savanna ecology through their construction of settlements, traditional movement patterns in search of forage, water and safety for their livestock. Construction of settlements initiates localised changes in the vegetation due to clearance of vegetation at construction and collection of construction materials. During the occupation period a lot of dung is deposited in and around settlements. When pastoral families abandon settlements and move away, they leave behind mud huts and livestock corrals surrounded by fences.

This study uses a series of Landsat images to map the main land-cover types on the Mediterranean island of Lesvos, Greece. We compare a single-year maximum likelihood classification (MLC) with a multi-temporal maximum likelihood classification (MTMLC) approach, with time-series class labels modelled using a first-order hidden Markov model comprising continuous and discrete variables. A rigorous validation scheme shows statistically significant higher accuracy figures for the multi-temporal approach.