Landscape changes and the processes driving them have been a critical component in both research and management efforts of savanna systems. These dynamics impact human populations, wildlife, carbon storage, and general spatio-temporal dynamism in response to both anthropomorphic and climatic shifts. Both biophysical and human agents of change can be identified by isolating their respective spatial, temporal, and organizational contingencies.

This paper describes the development of a Land Information Management System (LIMS) for County Governments in Kenya. In the new Constitution 2010, devolution of some national government functions and formation of county governments was provided for. These invoked the development of new land laws to guide the devolution processes and procedures. According to the County Government Act 2012, all County Governments are supposed to develop digital Geographic Information System (GIS) based spatial plans and these calls for development of LIMS for and efficient breakthrough.

1. Patch dynamics is a new, potentially unifying mechanism for the explanation of tree-grass coexistence in savannas. In this scale-explicit paradigm, savannas consist of patches in which a cyclical succession between woody and grassy dominance proceeds spatially asynchronously. The growing ecological and economic problem of shrub encroachment is a natural transient phase in this cycle. 2. An important step towards understanding patterns at the landscape scale is achieved by investigating mechanisms at a smaller scale.

Widely occurred woody encroachment in grass-dominated ecosystems has the potential to influence soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) pools at local, regional, and global scales. Evaluation of this potential requires assessment of both pool sizes and their spatial patterns. We quantified SOC and TN, their relationships with soil and vegetation attributes, and their spatial scaling along a catena (hill-slope) gradient in the southern Great Plains, USA where woody cover has increased substantially over the past 100 years.

The relationships between water yields of tributaries and coverage of different vegetation types in the corresponding sub-watersheds were investigated during the wet season in the Heishui River Valley, located in the upper portion of the Yangtze River in western China. Stable isotope analysis was used to calculate the relative contributions of the tributaries to water yield in the main stem of the Heishui River, while relative coverages of the different vegetation types were calculated from classified Landsat 7 TM satellite images of the study area.

This study examines rural women access to and control of agricultural production resources in arable small-scale sustainable agricultural production in a developing country setting. Specifically, the study addresses the women's level of accessibility and control of arable land in agricultural production in the North West Region of Cameroon.

Prior studies exploring the quantitative relationship between landscape structure metrics and the ecological condition of receiving waters have used a variety of sampling units (e.g., a watershed, or a buffer around a sampling station) at a variety of spatial scales to generate landscape metrics resulting in little consensus on which scales best describe land-water relationships. Additionally, the majority of these studies have focused on freshwater systems and it is not clear whether results are transferable to estuarine and marine systems.

Moderate-grained data may not always represent landscape structure in adequate detail which could cause misleading results. Certain metrics have been shown to be predictable with changes in scale; however, no studies have verified such predictions using independent fine-grained data.Our objective was to use independently derived land cover datasets to assess relationships between metrics based on fine- and moderate-grained data for a range of analysis extents.

We show empirically using panel data at the plot and farm level and based on a model incorporating supervision costs, risk, credit-market imperfections and scale-economies associated with mechanization that small-scale farming is inefficient in India. Larger farms are more profitable per acre, more mechanized, less constrained in input use after bad shocks, and employ less per-acre labor than small farms.

Process controls on water, sediment, nutrient, and organic carbon exports from the landscape through runoff are not fully understood. This paper provides analyses from 446 sites worldwide to evaluate the impact of environmental factors (MAP and MAT: mean annual precipitation and temperature; CLAY and BD: soil clay content and bulk density; S: slope gradient; LU: land use) on annual exports (RC: runoff coefficients; SL: sediment loads; TOCL: organic carbon losses; TNL: nitrogen losses; TPL: phosphorus losses) from different spatial scales.

Relating spatial patterns to ecological processes is one of the central goals of landscape ecology. The patch-corridor-matrix
model and landscape metrics have been the predominant approach to describe the spatial arrangement
of discrete elements (“patches”) for the last two decades. However, the widely used approach of using landscape
metrics for characterizing categorical map patterns is connected with a number of problems. We aim at stimulating
further developments in the field of the analysis of spatio-temporal landscape patterns by providing both a critical

The Guiding Principles are designed to help a number of stakeholders develop larger-scale agricultural investments that are more likely to prove sustainable, beneficial, and successful for communities, investors and governments.