It has been nearly 10 years since the federal government of Brazil decided to make land tenure regularization a true priority. In theory, millions of families who informally occupy the federal domain should receive freeholds, emphyteutic leases, concessions of real or special rights, or…
Ecosystem services provided by urban vegetation can ameliorate problems common to urban environments while improving the quality of life of urban residents. Much research in urban ecology has analyzed urban environmental dynamics in the global north; rapidly urbanizing areas in the global south…
Efforts to define and quantify soil quality are not new, but establishing consensus about a set of standardized indicators remains difficult. Also, the view of land managers is usually not taken into account when evaluating various sets of indicators. Our objective was to compare, in functional…
Data on humification is important to assessing the rate and magnitude of soil carbon (C) sequestration. Thus, this study assessed the humification degree (HLIF) of soil organic matter (SOM) and the changes in functional C groups (aromatic-C and aliphatic-C) for contrasting land use and…
A number of international donors, national governments and project proponents have begun to lay the groundwork for REDD+, but tenure insecurity – including the potential risks of land grabbing by outsiders and loss of local user rights to forests and forest land – is one of the main reasons that…
Remote sensing images obtained by remote sensing are a key source of data for studying large-scale geographic areas. From 2013 onwards, a new generation of land remote sensing satellites from USA, China, Brazil, India and Europe will produce in 1year as much data as 5 years of the Landsat-7…
Carbon plays a key role in determining soil health, which is defined as the soil's capacity to maintain environmental functions and biological productivity. In this study, C cycling was evaluated in soils along a gradient of land use, from native forest (NF), reforested sites (secondary…
Environmental fragility models are important decision tools for policy makers as they help quantify environmental sensitivity and understand the relationship between human activities and environmental quality. The objective of this study was to evaluate three different environmental fragility…
South America’s drylands remain some of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) in these understudied regions. Our objective is to map vegetation change in Brazil’s three largest dryland ecoregions – the…
The Cerrados of central Brazil have undergone profound landscape transformation in recent decades due to agricultural expansion, and this remains poorly assessed. The present research investigates the spatial-temporal rates and patterns of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes in one of the…
The rapid and efficient detection of illicit drug cultivation, such as that of Cannabis sativa, is important in reducing consumption. The objective of this study was to identify potential sites of illicit C. sativa plantations located in the semi-arid, southern part of Pernambuco State, Brazil.…
Economic globalization manifests in landscapes through regional integration initiatives involving trans-boundary infrastructure. While the relationships of roads, accessibility and land cover are well-understood, they have rarely been considered across borders in national frontier regions. We…