Business activities conducted in rural areas are associated with crop cultivation, animal rearing and agricultural produce processing. The countryside residents, after hard work, should be offered a chance of having pleasant leisure time activities. In general, the ambient conditions in rural areas provide many opportunities, but the surroundings should be adapted as to allow the pursuit of various forms of recreation.

The objective of the land legislation is to ensure the rights and interests of the subject in the land, which should be reflected in a clear legal regulation of procedures and conditions for seizure of land. According to the Land Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan dated 20.06.2003, all land should be used for its intended purpose. Use of land for the intended purpose means that the site should be used in accordance with the originally set goals - for agricultural production, housing, etc.

Increase in use of biomass as renewable source of energy in Europe is tightly linked to the policies aimed at mitigation of climate changes i.e. reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Both for assessment of the carbon sequestration and emissions as well as for assessment of potential amounts of biomass for renewable energy, information of land cover dynamics are essential. Therefore, the aim of our study was to improve accuracy of estimates of the land use changes in the time period between 1990 and 2014.

The study represents results on remote sensing methods based evaluation of land use and land use changes in former and existing peat extraction areas in Latvia. The aim of the study is to elaborate activity data set for the National GHG inventory for the wetlands remaining wetlands for peat extraction. The study results provide sufficient data for application of the default emission factors for the peat extraction sites and flooded lands.

The article presents the analysis of the Associations of Gardeners of Lithuania as well as the undergoing changes in their territories. The objective of the article is to discuss the current situation in the territories allocated to the amateur gardens and to assess the current issues concerning the land use and management. The associations of gardeners have encountered a great number of problems concerning the territorial planning, engineering communication services and services maintaining the needs of the associations, the expansion as well as development of these areas.

The land use pattern is affected by different factors. One group of factors related to studies of land use change are socio-economics. The aim of the study is to test if the various indicators describing local government capacity have any impact on changes in arable land use. The study focuses on Estonian rural municipalities. The first task was determination of land use changes for the period 2009-2015. The GIS overlay technique was implemented for this. The second task was a correlation analysis among indicators of changes in arable land use and indicators of local government capacity.

The aim of this article is to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of land consolidation process, as well as to find out the opportunities of this process, and the threats which prevent the successful development of land consolidation process. With the purpose to achieve the goal, the SWOT analysis of five land consolidation projects in western Lithuania was carried out.

This paper analyses the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and macroeconomy on land use changes in the EU. Three scenarios are simulated up to 2030: baseline, macro scenario and policy scenario. Simulation results indicate that GDP leads to a stronger effect on land use changes than the CAP. Stronger changes in land use are observed at the crop disaggregated level than at the aggregated level for the total agricultural area, arable land, grassland and permanent crops.