Urbanization increases impervious area, generates pollution and transforms the configuration, composition and context of land covers and thus has direct or indirect impacts on aquatic systems. Detecting land use-water quality relationships is of significance for both urban sustainable development and environmental risk management.

Despite claims that plantations both enhance and undermine the quality, valuation and protection of natural forests, plantation forestry continues to expand worldwide. In Paraguay, changes in environmental policy, extension practices, and public perception of eucalypts (Eucalyptus spp.) have promoted a boom in plantation production of these species over the last 20 years.

Integration of the Russian Federation in the international community, to find the most effective ways to implement the military and land reforms require a comprehensive study. The paper identifies the main problems that hinder the effective implementation of the reform of the conversion, the ways of their solutions, including use of the experience of the advanced countries of the European Union. Identified military objects to be conversion, shown combining them into groups according to various criteria. Proposed a typology of ex-military territories.

Relationships between land use/cover (LUC) and stream water quality have been well-documented in many environments and at a range of spatial scales. From these analyses, reduced in-stream biological integrity and habitat quality are commonly associated with increasing amounts of anthropogenic LUC. However, very few studies have examined the influence of landscape condition, relative to studies using LUC, on water quality parameters. Landscape condition indices use remote sensing-based data to quantify biophysical land surface condition.

The importance of soil storage in global carbon cycling is well recognised and factors leading to increased losses from this pool may act as a positive feedback mechanism in global warming. Upland peat soils are usually assumed to serve as carbon sinks, there is however increasing evidence of carbon loss from upland peat soils, and DOC concentrations in UK rivers have increased markedly over the past three decades.

Scientists have called repeatedly for a broader conservation agenda that emphasizes not only protected areas but also the landscapes in which those areas are embedded. We describe key advances in the science and practice of engaging private landowners in biodiversity conservation and propose a conceptual model for integrating conservation management on reserves and privately owned lands. The overall goal of our model is to blur the distinction between land management on reserves and the surrounding landscapes in a way that fosters widespread implementation of conservation practices.

The pastoral resources in eastern Sudan are changing under the combined impact of increasing anthropogenic activities such as clearance of natural vegetation and the effect of state policies that favour crop farming against pastoralism. Remotely sensed data are used to detect spatial and temporal changes from 1979 to 2009 in the land use/land cover (LULC) across three study sites. Areas of natural vegetation have been reduced from 26.1% in 1979 to 12.6% in 1999 and further to 9.4% in 2007. The majority of this reduction went into agricultural land.

Livestock grazing is the principal land use in arid central Asia, and range degradation is considered a serious problem within much of the high-elevation region of western China termed the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). Rangeland degradation on the QTP is variously attributed to poor livestock management, historical-cultural factors, changing land tenure arrangements or socioeconomic systems, climate change, and damage from small mammals. Few studies have examined currently managed pastures using detailed data capable of isolating fine-scale livestock–vegetation interactions.

Environmental factors controlling the distribution and abundance of boreal avifauna are not fully understood, limiting our ability to predict the consequences of a changing climate and industrial development activities underway. We used a compilation of avian point‐count data, collected over 1990–2008 from nearly 36 000 locations, to model the abundance of individual forest songbird species within the Canadian boreal forest.

Research studies aimed at integrating socio-economic and geo-bio-physical factors are increasingly being used in order to improve our understanding of the causes and effects of land-use change and to support sustainable landscape development. In line with such approaches, the study reported in this paper addresses land-use change and its drivers in the peripheral area of the Pyrenees National Park (PNP), France. The focus is land-use change on private farmland currently utilised by the farmers.

The population of the Critically Endangered Mariana crow Corvus kubaryi on the island of Rota, Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, has decreased dramatically in recent years. It is unclear to what extent negative practices by people, such as inappropriate land use or persecution of crows, have contributed to this decline. We conducted a public opinion survey to document ongoing practices towards the crows on Rota, to assess residents’ knowledge of and attitudes towards the birds, and to gauge potential responses to a government-instituted land incentive programme.