The enclosure system is an increasingly popular approach for land rehabilitation among communities inhabiting the arid and semi-arid lands in Africa. However, the mixed results associated with its adoption by households call for an in-depth understanding of the management regimes.

Regional estimates of soil carbon pool have been made using various approaches that combine soil maps with sample databases. The point soil organic carbon (SOC) densities are spatialized employing approaches like regression, spatial interpolation, polygon based summation, etc. The present work investigates a data mining based spatial imputation for spatial assessment of soil organic carbon density. The study area covers Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states of India.

In the last 100 years or so, desertification, degradation, and woody plant encroachment have altered huge tracts of semiarid rangelands. It is expected that the changes thus brought about significantly affect water balance in these regions; and in fact, at the headwater-catchment and smaller scales, such effects are reasonably well documented. For larger scales, however, there is surprisingly little documentation of hydrological change.

Increasing interest in wetlands for environmental management requires an understanding of the location, spatial extent, and configuration of the resource. The National Wetlands Inventory is the most commonly used data source for this information. However, its accuracy is limited in some contexts, such as agricultural and forested wetlands. An large number of studies have mapped wetlands worldwide from the perspective of land use and land cover change. However, information on the actual wetland planting areas annually is limited, which greatly impacts ongoing research.

Vector borne diseases are a threat to human health. Little attention has been paid to the prevention of these diseases. We attempted to identify the significant wetland characteristics associated with the spread of chikungunya, dengue fever and malaria in Kerala, a tropical region of South West India using multivariate analyses (hierarchical cluster analysis, factor analysis and multiple regression).

Population growth, urbanisation and climate change represent significant pressures on urban water resources, requiring water managers to consider a wider array of management options that account for economic, social and environmental factors.

In the Trás-os-Montes Region (Northeastern Portugal), olive tree plantations cover an area of more than 70 thousand ha (near the 6 % of the regional territory), mostly planted and cultivated under traditional non-mechanised cultural systems. It is fully recognised that the olive sector contributes significantly to the regional agro-economy, as well as to the conservation of certain typical landscapes.

Conservation programs faced with limited budgets often use a competitive enrollment mechanism. Goals of enrollment might include minimizing program expenditures, encouraging broad participation, and inducing adoption of enhanced environmental practices. We use experimental methods to evaluate an auction mechanism that incorporates bid maximums and quality adjustments. We examine this mechanism’s performance characteristics when opportunity costs are heterogeneous across potential participants, and when costs are only approximately known by the purchaser.

Assessing the driving forces of sandy desertification is fundamental and important for its control. It has been widely accepted that both climatic conditions and land use have great impact on sandy desertification in northern China. However, the relative role and synergistic effect of each driving force of sandy desertification are still not clear. In this paper, an indicator named as SI was defined to represent the integrated probability of sandy desertification caused by land use.

Concern about the possible affects of biofuels on deforestation have led toassigning biofuel producers with the responsibility for greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions of the indirect land use changes (ILUC) associated with their activitieswhen assessing their compliance with biofuel policies. We show that the computation of the ILUC is shrouded with uncertainty; they vary frequently, and are strongly affected by policy choices. It seems that its overall impact on GHGs is relatively minor.

The UAE has witnessed rapid urban development and economic growth in recent years. With its ambitious vision to become one of the advanced nations by 2021, planners and policy-makers need to know the most likely direction of future urban development. In this study, remotely sensed imagery coupled with cellular automata models were used to predict land cover in Al Ain, the second largest city in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Markov and cellular automata models were used for 1992 and 2006 to predict land cover in 2012.