The suburban territories of large cities are transitional zones where intensive transformations in land use are constantly taking place. Therefore, the presented work is devoted to an integrated assessment of land use changes in the Shortandy district (Kazakhstan) based on an integrated study of the dynamics of land use and sustainable development indicators (SDIs). It was found that the main tendency in the land use of this Peri-urban area (PUA) during 1992–2018 is their intensification, through an increase in arable lands.

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is a biotically important region of grassland, wetland, and cropland that traverses the Canada-US border. Significant amounts of grasslands and wetlands within the PPR have been converted to croplands in recent years due to increasing demand for biofuels. We characterized land dynamics across the US portion of the PPR (US–PPR) using the USDA Crop Data Layer (CDL) for 2006–2018. We also conducted a comparative analysis between two epochs (1998–2007 & 2008–2017) of the CDL data time series in the North Dakotan portion of the US–PPR.

Low-meat and no-meat diets are increasingly acknowledged as sustainable alternatives to current Western food consumption patterns. Concerns for the environment, individual health or animal welfare are raising consumers’ willingness to adopt such diets. Dietary shifts in Western countries may modify the way human-environment systems interact over distances, primarily as a result of existing trade flows in food products.

La région Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima située au nord-ouest du Maroc a connu, dans des dernières décennies, différents travaux d’aménagement de territoire qui ont eu, certainement, un impact sur le paysage et l’écosystème de la région. La région a accueilli des infrastructures de grandes tailles telles que le port Tanger Med installé au bord du détroit Gibraltar, la ligne de train à grande vitesse reliant Tanger à Casablanca, réseaux routiers, barrages…etc. L’objectif de cet article est de cartographier les changements du paysage de la région via l’analyse diachronique de l’occupation du sol.

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of social learning in governing and managing land use, the understanding and practice of learning has received limited attention from researchers. In global environmental programs and projects aimed at supporting sustainable land use in developing countries, learning is often promoted but without explicit learning goals. The focus may be on capacity building and community participation, and on testing policy tools, rather than on collaborative social learning.

Arid and semi-arid regions are particularly vulnerable to global environmental change because of their fragile climatic conditions. The rapid development of land use is expected to affect aquatic ecosystems in these regions. In this study, we focused on how land use change affects the stream flow and inflow to Urmia Lake in the Mordagh Chay basin, Iran. This case-study exemplifies dynamics found across a much larger region. We mapped changes in land use between 1993–2015 using satellite imagery and modeled future changes using the Dyna-CLUE model.

This report summarizes the implementation activities, “policy intersections” and the subsequent production of a draft model Land Use Bill (LUB, 2018) for Nigeria. This study broadly focused on land use intersections to determine appropriate policy for countering the problem of land rush/land concentration within the context of the previous Land Use Act (LUA, 1978).

Large areas of agricultural land have been abandoned in European Russia since 1991, triggering succession toward more wooded landscapes, especially in northern regions where conditions for agriculture are more challenging. We hypothesize that this process has contributed to a southward shift by migratory Atlantic Greater White-fronted geese, as stopover sites in northern Russia became progressively less suitable. To test this hypothesis, we located stopover sites from information contained in 2976 ring recoveries and sightings of neck-collared geese.

Understanding what drives, catalyzes or constraints land use change in the Brazilian agricultural frontier is a condition for effective policy design at the local level, which in turn might have implications for food production, environmental conservation and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. We analyzed the process of agricultural expansion observed in the state of Mato Grosso, the country's largest agricultural producer, by mapping and quantifying the incorporation of new farming areas and the conversion of existing ones into mechanized soybean fields at the farm-level.

A wide variety of settlement systems exist, ranging from small villages to large metropolises. However, spatial analyses are typically confined to the mere presence or absence of built-up land and the changes therein, while more subtle differences between various settlement systems are ignored. In this paper we study the spatial distribution of Chinese settlements in terms of their built-up land, cluster density and cluster size, as well as their changes between 1990 and 2010.

The meetings addressed the progress of the International Land Coalition for Africa (ILC), its strategic priorities, and as well, developed ideas on how to apply lessons learned. ILC focuses on providing specific recommendations that instigate land policies that satisfy the agenda of the African Union. The event featured forums on gender justice, and women’s land rights in relation to feminist land and community land protection.

Recent studies assessing agricultural policies, including the EU’s Agri-Environment Scheme, have shown that these have been successful in attaining some environmental goals. In Finland, however, the economic situation of farms has dramatically fallen and hence, the actions do not result in social acceptability. Sustainable intensification is a means to combine the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Here we introduce a novel land use optimization and planning tool for the sustainable intensification of high-latitude agricultural systems.