The urban sprawl process of Ulaanbaatar has changed dramatically due to population growth. Ulaanbaatar city land management master plan defined the settlement zone area suitable for living as 33,698 ha. However, due to unrestricted urban sprawl caused by the exponential growth of the city’s population, the settlement zone area reached 39,235 ha, which exceeds the limit by 5537 ha. In order to tackle this issue, several urban planning concepts were developed to be implemented within Ulaanbaatar city urban planning framework.

Urban greenness plays a vital role in supporting the ecosystem services of a city. Exploring the dynamics of urban greenness space and their driving forces can provide valuable information for making solid urban planning policies. This study aims to investigate the dynamics of urban greenness space patterns through landscape indices and to apply geographically weighted regression (GWR) to map the spatially varied impact on the indices from economic and environmental factors.

Low adoption of sustainable intensification technologies hinders achievement of their potential impacts on increasing agricultural productivity. Proper targeting of locations to scale-out particular technologies is a key determinant of the rate of adoption. Targeting locations with similar biophysical and socio-economic characteristics significantly increases the probability of adoption. Areas with similar biophysical and socio-economic characteristics are referred to as recommendation domains (RDs).

This study examined the trends, driving factors, and implications of land use/land cover (LULC) dynamics over the past 35 years (1982–2017) in three watersheds of the drought-prone areas that represent different agro-ecologies of Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia: Guder (highland), Aba Gerima (midland), and Debatie (lowland). The changes in LULC were analyzed by integrating field observations, remote-sensing data (aerial photographs [1: 50,000 scale] and very high resolution [0.5–3.2 m] satellite images), and geographic information systems.

Urban green spaces and their role in the quality of life of residents have been studied across multiple disciplines, based on empirical measurements or qualitative studies – however, the relation, and its strength, between spatial indicators of urban green spaces and visitors’ perceptions of green spaces are less known.

Recent studies assessing agricultural policies, including the EU’s Agri-Environment Scheme, have shown that these have been successful in attaining some environmental goals. In Finland, however, the economic situation of farms has dramatically fallen and hence, the actions do not result in social acceptability. Sustainable intensification is a means to combine the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Here we introduce a novel land use optimization and planning tool for the sustainable intensification of high-latitude agricultural systems.

An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly contradictory evidence on land use change was interpreted in a way that overemphasised degradation.

Land as an essential resource is becoming increasingly scarce due to population growth. In the case of the Kenyan coast, population pressure causes land cover changes in the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, which is an important habitat for endangered species. Forest and bushland have been changed to agricultural land in order to provide livelihood for the rural population who are highly dependent on small-scale farming. Unclear land rights and misbalanced access to land cause uncontrolled expansion and insecure livelihoods.

The construction of consistent time series of land use presents a key challenge when accounting for elective land use-based activities under the Kyoto Protocol (wetland drainage and rewetting (WDR), cropland management (CM) and grazing land management (GM)), in which current land use-driven greenhouse gas emissions are compared to a reference situation in 1990. This case study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using high-resolution land-use proxies from different datasets for Kyoto accounting in a data-rich case study region in Germany.

Brazil has, on the one hand, strong institutions in various areas, improved social situation and, on the other, the rural land situation is still very precarious, with basic unresolved questions, such as for example, knowledge of what is public and private land, due to the absence of cadaster. The legislation moved forward in an attempt to link the cadasters of INCRA, the Internal Revenue Service, with information from the Registry of Real Estate with the enactment of Law No. 10,267 / 2001, creating the National Register of Rural Properties – CNIR.

Recent rapid population growth and increasing urbanisation have led to fast vertical developments in urban areas. Therefore, in the context of the dynamic property market, factors related to the third dimension (3D) need to be considered. Current hedonic price modelling (HPM) studies have little explicit consideration for the third dimension, which may have a significant influence on modelling property values in complex urban environments.

Estimates of the area or percent area of the land cover classes within a study region are often based on the reference land cover class labels assigned by analysts interpreting satellite imagery and other ancillary spatial data. Different analysts interpreting the same spatial unit will not always agree on the land cover class label that should be assigned. Two approaches for accommodating interpreter variability when estimating the area are simple averaging (SA) and latent class modeling (LCM).