The accelerated development of energy resources around the world has substantially increased forest change related to oil and gas activities. In some cases, oil and gas activities are the primary catalyst of land-use change in forested landscapes. We discuss the challenges associated with characterizing ecological change related to energy resource development using North America as an exemplar. We synthesize the major impacts of energy development to forested ecosystems and offer new perspectives on how to detect and monitor anthropogenic disturbance during the Anthropocene.

Present decisions about urbanization of peri-urban (PU) areas may contribute to the capacity of cities to mitigate future climate change. Comprehensive mitigative responses to PU development should require integration of urban form and food production to realise potential trade-offs. Despite this, few studies examine greenhouse gas (GHG) implications of future urban development combined with impacts on PU food production.

Recently, the call to combine land change science (LCS) and political ecology (PE) in the study of human-environment interactions has been widely discussed by scientists from both subfields of geography. In this paper, we use a hybrid ecology framework to examine the effects of conservation policies on the environment and the livelihood of the people of the Korup National Park (KNP). Using techniques in both PE and LCS, our results show that conservation policies, politics, and population are the primary drivers of environmental change in the KNP.

A particular challenge for undertaking urbanization mapping of Beirut is the absence of a unified understanding of the city. Migration, informal settlements, a lack of urban planning, political corruption, as well as internal conflict have made this task even harder. The population in Lebanon is unevenly distributed among regions, where one third of the population resides in the Greater Beirut Area (GBA), whereas it occupies only 233 km2 (2% of Lebanon’s total area). The Greater Beirut Area is subject to pressures arising from population growth and economic expansion.

Anthropogenic land use will likely present a greater challenge to biodiversity than climate change this century in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Even if species are equipped with the adaptive capacity to migrate in the face of a changing climate, they will likely encounter a human-dominated landscape as a major dispersal obstacle. Our goal was to identify, at the ecoregion-level, protected areas in close proximity to lands with a higher likelihood of future land-use conversion.

Anthropogenic factors are responsible for major land use and land cover changes (LULCC). Bale Mountain Eco-Region in Ethiopia is a biodiversity-rich ecosystem where such LULCC have occurred. The specific objectives of this study were to: (i) determine which LULC types gained or lost most as a result of the observed LULCC; (ii) identify the major drivers of the LULCC/deforestation; and (iii) assess the approximate amount of carbon stock removed as a result of deforestation during the study period. Remote sensing and GIS were used to analyze LULCC.

In-depth understanding about the vertical distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) density is crucial for carbon (C) accounting, C budgeting and designing appropriate C sequestration strategies. We examined the vertical distribution of SOC density under different land use/land cover (LULC) types, altitudinal zones and aspect directions in a montane ecosystem of Bhutan. Sampling sites were located using conditioned Latin hypercube sampling (cLHS) scheme. Soils were sampled based on genetic horizons.

The rapid economic growth in Lao PDR over the last two decades has been driven by the natural resource sectors and commercialization in the agriculture sector. Rural landscapes are being transformed over the past decade from land use mosaics of subsistence and smallholder farms to large-scale plantations dominated by a few commercial crops.

This paper analyzes and quantifies the land use/land cover changes of the main forest and semi-natural landscape types in Sicily between 1955 and 2012. We analyzed seven representative forest and shrubland landscapes in Sicily. These study areas were chosen for their importance in the Sicilian forest panorama. We carried out a diachronic survey on historical and current aerial photos; all the aerial images used to survey the land use/land cover changes were digitalized and georeferenced in the UTM WGS84 system.

Fire is a key component of many land use systems and a determinant of land change. There is a growing concern that climate change will cause more catastrophic fires, but in many areas the impacts will be mediated by human land use practices. In African savannas, for example, fires are frequent and research finds low inter-annual variability in burned areas in places with highly variable rainfall. This regularity of fire suggests that African regimes are humanized, meaning that they are governed by human practices more than climate variation.

Estimating deforested areas and deforestation rates have become key steps for quantifying environmental services of tropical rain forests, particularly as linked to programs such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). In Southeastern Peru, reliable estimates of land-cover change (LCC) are important for monitoring changes in the landscape due to agricultural expansion, pasture creation and other socio-economic influences triggered by the Inter-Oceanic Highway (IOH).

By 2050, 90% of the population in Latin America will live in cities, but there is a lack of up-to-date spatial information about the urban extent and patterns of urbanization in cities of this region. In this study, we analyzed population growth, urban density and urbanization dynamics between 1992 and 2009 in the major cities of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Perú using Google Earth and DMSP/OLS night-time lights imagery. We used Google Earth to map the urban extent, and time series of night-time lights to analyze spatial patterns of urban development.