Land supports the survival and development of humans. To safeguard the land use security of continental river watersheds in arid regions, the oasis of the Manas River Watershed was investigated using 15 evaluation indexes from three subsystems, including land use suitability, land use vulnerability and water security to provide a comprehensive evaluation based on the methods of analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy synthetic evaluation model, social economy and land use/cover data from remote sensing images for 1976, 1987, 1998 and 2010.

Slash and burn agriculture is a traditional and predominant land use practice in Madagascar and its relevance in the context of forest preservation is significant. At the end of a cycle of culture, the fields become mostly weed covered and the soil fertility starts to drop. As a consequence, these fields are abandoned (they are called “monka”) and the farmers, in the best case, re-use old surfaces where the vegetation has recovered to some extent. Nevertheless, some of the farmers continue to extend part of their cultures into the natural forest.

Context Primates are one of the most charismatic and widely studied vertebrate groups. However, the study of new world primates in green patches within urban areas has been neglected. Such primates have been viewed as a source of human–animal conflict; however, their ecological importance to urban ecosystems and their role in human well being is poorly understood. Aims To increase understanding of both ecological and socioeconomical factors affecting the distribution, density and group sizes of urban marmosets in a large Brazilian city (Belo Horizonte).

Context Reptiles, especially snakes, can cause a fear reaction in the public and are, therefore, a good model to examine human–wildlife conflicts. Human city dwellers often respond to the presence of snakes or other reptiles by calling out the responsible agency for animal control, which has to mediate the situation. Aims To determine how the temporal and spatial occurrence of human–reptile conflicts were associated with environmental conditions and socio-economic factors in a large Brazilian city (Belo Horizonte).

The past two decades saw rapid and massive urbanization and industrialization in China. Despite much research has been reportedly done at local and regional scales, little has been reported on the trajectories, patterns, and drivers of these two intertwining processes at the national level. This is mainly due to the fact that until recently, high resolution spatial data of land use and land cover change were not available at national level. The research reported in this paper aimed to fill this knowledge gap.

Small livestock (goats, sheep, llamas, camels…) like other agricultural activities could have to face dramatic social, economical and environmental challenges. These challenges are identified underlining that these activities are often important and well present in countries with low incomes or in less favored areas. Although they are often low input production systems with lower environmental impacts, they face desertification and less water availability, genetic erosion, soil degradation and degradation of rangelands, competitions for land use.

This paper develops a dynamic micro-economic land use model that maximizes social welfare and internalizes externality from greenhouse gas emissions to obtain the optimal land use allocation for traditional row crops and bioenergy crops (corn stover, miscanthus and switchgrass), the mix of cellulosic feedstocks and fuel and food prices. We use this carbon tax policy as a benchmark to compare the implications of existing biofuel policies on land use, social welfare and the environment for the 2007-2022 period.

The importance of agriculture is decreasing all over the world. The aim of the paper is to compare the ownership structure and land use in some selected former Central and Eastern European countries. The property structure and land use is in dichotomy, the production is performed simultaneously on small-size farms which produce primarily for self-consumption. The importance of farm land leases is increasing.

Steppe, an important belt to protect North China from dust storms, is vulnerable and has been degraded in recent decades because of climatic change and heavy grazing. In order to improve steppe management, this study presents a framework for the monitoring of grazing intensity in Xilingol steppe of middle Inner Mongolia, northern China, by integrating the CENTURY ecosystem model-based simulation and remotely sensed MODIS data-based inversion.

Based on the same data source of Landsat TM/ETM+ in 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, all urban built-up areas in China are mapped mainly by human interpretation. Mapping results were checked and refined by the same analyst with the same set of criteria. The results show during the last 20 years urban areas in China have increased exponentially more than 2 times. The greatest area of urbanization changed from Northeastern provinces in 1990s to the Southeast coast of China in Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, and Zhejiang in 2010s. Urban areas are mostly converted from croplands in China.