Soil erosion is a growing problem in Central Chile, particularly in coastal dry lands, where it can significantly decrease the productivity of rainfed agriculture and forestry. In this study, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS), and used to evaluate the effects of different combinations of vegetative cover on soil erosion rates for Santo Domingo County in Central Chile. Implementing RUSLE in the GIS required a complete description of the county’s soils, climate, topography and current land use/land cover.

SUMMARYZambia has one of the largest forest resources in southern Africa with almost 66% of its land mass under forest cover. However, indiscriminate harvesting of valuable timber resources for commodity-type products such as sawn-timber, charcoal and fuel-wood are the main drivers of forest depletion. Challenges related to customary-lands, land-tenure, lack of information about forest resources as well as the weak institutions is contributing factors that have accelerated to steady reduction of forest cover in the country.

Increasing land utilization through diverse forms of human activities, such as agriculture, forestry, urban growth, and industrial development, has led to negative impacts on the water quality of rivers. To find out how catchment attributes, such as land use, hydrologic soil groups, and lithology, can affect water quality variables (Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, Na⁺, Cl⁻, HCO₃⁻, pH, TDS, EC, SAR), a spatio-statistical approach was applied to 23 catchments in southern basins of the Caspian Sea.

The drivers and pressures experienced by farmland, forestry and upland sites in the UK Environmental Change Network (ECN) over the last 20 years are reported through the lens of recognised approaches to the assessment of ecosystem service delivery. Temporal trends in ecosystem service delivery were examined using two methods: qualitative narratives and quantitative scoring of ecosystem service delivery according to land cover. While all sites included in this study are within the same national governance unit (i.e.

This paper describes the development and implementation of a method to measure the transaction costs in situations of multiple land-use, where the actions of one actor have negative effects on the other and vice versa (i.e., where the two actors’ usage patterns are interdependent). In situations where more than one agent is using a limited resource, transaction costs arise, which may affect the governance of that resource. For example, in northern Sweden the forestry and reindeer husbandry sectors incur transaction costs during consultations over land-use management.

The real tool for achieving of sustainable development is an integrated landscape management. It was defined by Agenda21. It means an integrated approach to planning and to management of landscape resources. In the Slovak Republic the concept of integrated landscape management overcames development on the theoretical-methodological, conceptual and implementational sites. Current is the integrated landscape management defined in the legislation and desired and implemented by several spatial planning processes.

In Greece, there is no official inventory for the activity land use, land use change and forestry. The national forest inventory was completed in 1992. Using the data of this inventory, the carbon store of woody biomass of Greece has been estimated by FAO-TBFRA (2000) as 52.04 millions t C, of which 46.36 millions t C is above stump biomass and 8.67 millions t C is stump and root biomass.

This paper studies the willingness to pay (WTP) for forest property rights in Viet Nam. We do so by asking respondents to estimate the value of two different forest property rights regimes where only the level of property security differs and all other forest plot characteristics are constant. We use this information to identify the value of the property rights security.

The landscape surrounding Sudbury, Ontario, has been severely affected by 100 years of mining and forestry and a recent, large-scale ecological risk assessment found that terrestrial plant communities continue to be impaired by remnant metals and poor soil conditions. We investigated the risks of these adverse landscape conditions on a small headwater stream by digitizing land cover at a fine scale and relating it to benthic invertebrate diversity and metal concentrations at 13 sites in the system.

Decades of heavy-cutting and high-grading in the northeastern United States provide an opportunity for rehabilitation and increased carbon stores, yet few studies have examined the feasibility of using carbon markets to restore high-graded forests. We evaluated the effectiveness of rehabilitation on 391 ha of high-graded forest in Vermont, USA. Thirteen silvicultural scenarios were modeled over 100 years using the Forest Vegetation Simulator.

Land use reflects the needs, demands and values of human society. We can see two antagonistic trends of land use change in Slovakia over the past few decades. Land use change towards more intensive in some areas (vicinity of cities, highways, lowlands), but others (uplands and mountains with traditionally agricultural used) are abandoned and left to their own spontaneous dynamic. The abandonment of agriculture is a pattern common to all industrialized countries, especially in hilly and mountain ranges (Farina, A., 2007).