Wildlands are increasingly lost to human development. Conservation scientists repeatedly call for protecting the remaining wildlands and expanding the land area protected in reserves. Despite these calls, conservation reserves can be eliminated through legislation that demotes their conservation status. For example, legislation introduced to the Congress of the United States recently would demote 29 Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) from the protections afforded by their existing status.

Forest reference (emission) levels (FREL/FRLs) are baselines for REDD+, and 34 countries have submitted their FREL/FRLs to UNFCCC by January 2018. Most of them used simple historical average without considering the stages of forest transition. This research suggested that the period of calculating FREL/FRLs of simple historical average should be properly chosen if these countries are occupying multiple stages or sub-stages of forest transition.

Policy objectives to maintain ecosystem services are increasingly set. Methods to identify priority areas for ecosystem services can assist in the implementation of such policy objectives. While land use change is an important driver of changes in ecosystem services over time, most prioritization studies do not account for land use change or only assess negative effects. We assessed the effect of land use change on ecosystem services in Europe for a 40-year period and the subsequent consequences for identifying priority areas. We quantified five services under current and future land use.

This paper is about the research methods, stages, challenges and results of the LASCAUX programme, a European research programme that took place over five years, between February 2009 and January 2014. The LASCAUX programme is concerned with food issues, “from plough to plate”, from a mainly legal perspective. More particularly, the nuclear core of the programme is based on the study of the concept of "food security", according to the definition from the FAO.

A fast-changing climate, conflict, inequality, persistent pockets of poverty and hunger and rapid urbanization are challenging countries’ efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to a UN report launched in New York today.

The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2018 found that conflict and climate change were major contributing factors leading to growing numbers of people facing hunger and forced displacement, as well as curtailing progress towards universal access to basic water and sanitation services.

El manual proporciona información sobre los procedimientos que siguen las brigadas de campo para realizar el establecimiento de los conglomerados y parcelas permanentes del Inventario Forestal Nacional (IFN). Asimismo, suministra información acerca de la planificación y ejecución de cada una de las fases que contempla el operativo, describe los métodos, técnicas e instrumentos que se emplean en la toma de los datos, y detalla el proceso de diligenciamiento de los formatos creados por IDEAM para registrar los datos e información de campo.

Watershed management in a Soil & Water Conservation (SWC) context - combining upland and channel measures. Concept and selected techniques

Distinguishing between the ecosystems’ capacity to generate ecosystem services (ES) and the actual use of these service (ES flow) in ES assessment and mapping is important to develop an understanding of the sustainability of ES use. This study assesses the spatial variation in ES capacity and flow in the Mediterranean small island state of Malta. The services included in this study were crop provisioning, beekeeping and honey production, fodder and livestock production, crop pollination, air quality regulation, and aesthetic ES.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of landscape research, many different systems and methods for landscape identification and classification exist. This paper provides a systematic review of 54 contemporary landscape characterisation approaches from all over the world, with the aim of identifying major methodological strategies. Multivariate statistical analyses revealed segregation of the approaches according to the landscape concept applied, the degree of observer independence and various other factors involved in the landscape characterisation process.

Land supply elasticities determine the rates of land conversion in global policy models. However, they are only available for few countries in the world. Therefore, analysts seeking to improve the spatial resolution of their models are forced to impose regionally homogeneous parameters over highly heterogeneous regions. This article estimates spatially explicit land supply elasticities using gridded data for the American continent. These estimates reasonably reproduce changes in land use observed at different levels of geographical aggregation across the continent.

Environmental policies and regulations have been instrumental in influencing deforestation rates around the world. Understanding how these policies change stakeholder behaviours is critical for determining policy impact. In Queensland, Australia, changes in native vegetation management policy seem to have influenced land clearing behaviour of landholders. Periods of peak clearing rates have been associated with periods preceding the introduction of stricter legislation. However, the characteristics of clearing patterns during the last two decades are poorly understood.