Assessment and reporting of changes in vegetation condition at site and landscape scales is critical for land managers, policy makers and planers at local, regional and national scales. Land management, reflecting individual and collective values, is used to show historic changes in ecosystem structure, composition and function (regenerative capacity). We address the issue of how the resilience of plant communities changes over time as a result of land management regimes.

Present decisions about urbanization of peri-urban (PU) areas may contribute to the capacity of cities to mitigate future climate change. Comprehensive mitigative responses to PU development should require integration of urban form and food production to realise potential trade-offs. Despite this, few studies examine greenhouse gas (GHG) implications of future urban development combined with impacts on PU food production.

This paper reviews 91 recent empirical and theoretical studies that analyzed land-use change at the farm-household level. The review builds on a conceptual framework of land-use change drivers and conducts a meta-analysis. Results show that the conversion of forests into cultivated land or grassland, mainly used for agriculture or ranching, are most frequently analyzed. Only a small number of studies consider the transition of wetlands for agriculture and few cases deal with the conversion from agriculture into protected zones.