CONTEXT: The role of agricultural landscapes in biodiversity conservation is an emerging topic in a world experiencing a worrying decrease of species richness. Farm systems may either decrease or increase biological diversity, depending on land-use intensities and management. OBJECTIVES: We present an intermediate disturbance-complexity model (IDC) of cultural landscapes aimed at assessing how different levels of anthropogenic disturbance on ecosystems affect the capacity to host biodiversity depending on the land matrix heterogeneity.

Urbanization in India is rapidly increasing. Dispersed development along highways or surrounding cities and in rural areas is resulting in serious loss of agricultural land, open space, waterbodies, and ecologically sensitive habitats. The management and monitoring of such resources require an understanding of change in land use and land cover. Vadodara City in Gujarat, India, has been chosen as the study area because it is a rapidly developing city with increasing urbanization and industrialization.

An urban net all-wave radiation parameterization scheme is evaluated using annual datasets for 2010 recorded at a Beijing urban observation site. The statistical relationship between observed data and simulation data of net radiation has a correlation coefficient of 0.98 and model efficiency of 0.93. Therefore, it can be used to simulate the radiation balance of Beijing. This study analyzes the variation in the radiation balance for different underlying surfaces. To simulate radiation balance differences, we set four pure land-cover types (forest, grass, roads, and buildings).

Conflicts over land-grabs for industry, infrastructure and urbanization are on the rise in emerging economies. A slew of policy measures undergird such land deals in India but have encountered successful resistance from peasants and citizens groups. In Goa, resistance led to the revocation of the state's special economic zone (SEZ) policy and cancellation of all approved SEZs, many developed by prominent realty firms. As battle over three SEZs continues in the Supreme Court of India, there is hope that commons will be returned to local communities.

This paper describes the Salt Lake Valley urban flux study that was designed to understand the role of vegetation and urbanization on CO₂ and surface energy fluxes over surfaces typical of urbanized and pre-urbanized land cover in the semi-arid Salt Lake Valley. The eddy covariance technique was applied at two different sites with distinct land forms within an urbanizing mountain basin.

We summarized all known historical and contemporary data on the geographic distribution of Etheostoma raneyi (Yazoo Darter), a range-restricted endemic in the Little Tallahatchie and Yocona rivers (upper Yazoo River basin), MS. We identified federal and state land ownership in relation to the darter's distribution and provided quantitative estimates of abundance of the species.

Stream fish distributions are commonly linked to environmental disturbances affecting terrestrial landscapes. In Great Plains prairie streams, the independent and interactive effects of watershed impoundments and land cover changes remain poorly understood despite their prevalence and assumed contribution to declining stream fish diversity.

Urbanization effects on ecosystem functions are both important and complex, characterized by scale multiplicity, spatial heterogeneity, and intensive human disturbances. Integrating the hierarchical structure of urban landscape pattern with ecosystem processes through simulation modeling can facilitate our understanding of human–environment interactions in urban environment.

The diurnal land surface temperature (LST) variation is a primary characteristic of the effects of urbanization. However, no study to date has focused on changes in diurnal LST variation in urban environments. This paper investigates the effects of urbanization on landscape pattern and diurnal LST variation of Taipei City, using MODIS thermal images and SPOT multispectral remote sensing images over the 1994–2010 period. Supervised land-cover classifications were conducted to investigate decadal land-cover changes within the study area.

With continuing proliferation of human influences on landscapes, there is mounting incentive to undertake quantification of relationships between spatial patterns of human populations and vegetation. In considering such quantification, it is apparent that investigations must be conducted at different scales and in a comparative manner across regions. At the broader scales it becomes necessary to utilize remote sensing of vegetation for comparative studies against map referenced census data. This paper explores such an approach for the urbanized area in the Tokyo vicinity.

Urban trees can potentially mitigate environmental degradation accompanying rapid urbanisation via a range of tree benefits and services. But uncertainty exists about the extent of tree benefits and services because urban trees also impose costs (e.g. asthma) and may create hazards (e.g. windthrow). Few researchers have systematically assessed how urban tree benefits and costs vary across different cities, geographic scales and climates.