PURPOSE: Land use in dry lands can result in a final stage where land is completely depleted or entirely degraded causing the desertification phenomenon. The first part (part 1) of this series of two articles proposed a methodology to include desertification in life cycle assessment (LCA). A set of variables to be measured in the life cycle inventory, characterization factors, and an impact assessment method for the life cycle impact assessment phase were proposed.

Literature on environmental change often highlights the importance of public policies as a key driver of land use and land cover change. However, demonstration of policy impacts in agricultural settings has been hampered by the lack of systematic analysis across landholders, who may not universally adopt government policy incentives, or time periods, which may be associated with differing policy regimes.

Climate change affected the agricultural expansion and the formation of farming-grazing transitional patterns during historical periods. This study analyzed the possible range of the boundary shift of the potential suitable agriculture area in the farming-grazing transitional zone in the northeastern China during the 20th century.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was presents an organization of agricultural use of lands contaminated by radioactive elements. There were shown theoretical bases of the main problems forming the components of a complex project of intra-farm land usage.

Cultivating annual row crops in high topographic relief waterway buffers has negative environmental effects and can be environmentally unsustainable.

The concept of Ecosystem Services has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. Among the different categories, typical Ecosystem Services categories such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban contexts.

Image fusion assists in visual interpretation, mapping, change detection and many other applications. Multispectral and Panchromatic images are fused to produce images having enhanced spatial and spectral properties. These properties are generally distorted from original images. The aim of this paper is to identify the effectiveness of the several fusion techniques based on the distortions and applications.

Beef cattle grazing is the dominant land use in the extensive tropical and sub-tropical rangelands of northern Australia. Despite the considerable knowledge on land and herd management gained from both research and practical experience, the adoption of improved management is limited by an inability to predict how changes in practices and combinations of practices will affect cattle production, economic returns and resource condition.

Changes in the use of land in the United States produce significant economic and environmental effects with important implications for a wide variety of policy issues, including protection of wildlife habitat, management of urban growth, and mitigation of global climate change. In contrast to previous descriptive and qualitative analyses of the trends in national land use, this paper uses an econometric approach to isolate the importance of historical changes in land-use profits and key government policies in determining national land-use changes from 1982 to 1997.

This study analyses forest dynamics and land use/land cover change over a 43-year period using spatial-stand-type maps of temporal forest management plans of Karaisalı Forest Enterprise in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of Turkey. Stand parameters (tree species, crown closures and developmental stages) of the dynamics and changes caused by natural or artificial intervention were introduced and mapped in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and subjected to fragmentation analysis using FRAGSTATS.

Suburban areas continue to grow rapidly and are potentially an important land-use category for anthropogenic carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Here eddy covariance techniques are used to obtain ecosystem-scale measurements of CO₂ fluxes (FC) from a suburban area of Baltimore, Maryland, USA (2002–2006). These are among the first multi-year measurements of FC in a suburban area. The study area is characterized by low population density (1500inhabitants km⁻²) and abundant vegetation (67.4% vegetation land-cover).