Heat island is the main product of urban climate, and one of the important problems of twenty-first century. Cities in tropical countries suffer extensively due to the urban heat island effect, and urban climate studies are necessary to improve the comfort level and city planning. Chennai is the tropical city; it is the fourth largest metropolis in India and one of the fastest growing economic and industrial growth centers in South Asia.

Qinglong County in Guizhou, China is a typical karst canyon area. Using quadrat methods and a land use transfer matrix we studied the carbon storage spatial distribution pattern and evolution process over three independent periods (1988, 1999 and 2009) in this area. Based on the results we estimated the carbon pool capacity of the entire karst canyon area in Guizhou and contribution ratios. Carbon storage and average carbon density of the karst area in Qinglong decreased at first, and then increased over the sampling period.

The productivity of arid environments and the reproductive success of vertebrates in these systems, are typically thought to be primarily influenced by rainfall patterns. Data from our 15 year study at an Australian arid zone site reveals asynchronous demographic responses to rainfall and other climatic variables among different lizard species.

Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context.

Although protected areas have become the primary mechanism for biodiversity conservation, their establishment can have long-term impacts on land use, land cover, and livelihoods of people living near them. Where land use and resource extraction is severely limited, local people turn to resource pools outside parks. Kibale National Park in western Uganda is a remnant of a previously larger, mid-altitude forest region surrounded by dense agricultural settlement.

Identification of suitable site for urban development in hilly areas is one of the critical issues of planning. Site suitability analysis has become inevitable for delineating appropriate site for various developmental initiatives, especially in the undulating terrain of the hills. The study illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) and multicriteria evaluation (MCE) technique for selection of suitable sites for urban development in Mussoorie municipal area, Dehradun district, Uttarakhand.

In this research we have modified the standard US MARKAL model to include a land resource base, corn stover and miscanthus feedstocks, and new cost information for biochemical and thermochemical conversion technologies.

Shanghai is physically and socio-economically vulnerable to accelerated sea level rise because of its low elevation, flat topography, highly developed economy and highly-dense population. In this paper, two scenarios of sea level rise and storm surge flooding along the Shanghai coast are presented by forecasting 24 (year 2030) and 44 (year 2050) years into the future and are applied to a digital elevation model to illustrate the extent to which coastal areas are susceptible to levee breach and overtopping using previously developed inflow calculating and flood routing models.

Understanding farmer decisions on land use conversions (LUC) in rural areas has significant importance to understand and predict the patterns of land use changes in China. Many methods have been developed to search for the influencing factors on land use changes at farm household level. However, these methods have difficulty in evaluating the intertwined influences between factors and achieving farmer decision rules on LUC.