In the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia gully occurrence is linked to poverty-driven unsustainable use of the land in a vulnerable semi-arid and mountainous environment, where intensive rainfall challenges the physical integrity of the landscape. Trends in gully and river channel erosion, and their relation to triggering environmental changes can proffer valuable insights into sustainable development in Northern Ethiopia.

Small blanket bog lakes can contain many rare and threatened aquatic invertebrate species. Their conservation value, however, is threatened throughout Europe by peat extraction and particularly conifer afforestation, which can compromise the physico-chemical habitat quality of peatland lakes through excessive inputs of forestry-derived dissolved and particulate substances.

Northeast Asia is an area with relative concentrations of resources, a complex ecological environment pattern, and a marked human—land contrast relationship. This area has significance for analyzing land cover patterns and variations for regional sustainable development among the trans-boundary areas of China, Russia, and Mongolia. In this paper, the transect analysis research tool and transfer matrix method are used to capture the regional land cover change characteristics by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) datasets recorded from 2001 to 2012.

The vegetation of semi‐arid and arid landscapes is often comprised of mixtures of herbaceous and woody vegetation. Since the early 1900s, shifts from herbaceous to woody plant dominance, termed woody plant encroachment and widely regarded as a state change, have occurred world‐wide. This shift presents challenges to the conservation of grassland and savanna ecosystems and to animal production in commercial ranching systems and pastoral societies.

Proteins comprise one of the largest N inputs to soils. There is, therefore, a need to investigate the factors involved in the inputs and fate of proteins in soil. While land use management is expected to influence the amount and diversity of soil proteins, the responses of protein as a source of mineralizable N to land use changes have not yet been studied. We hypothesized that extractable soil protein could be a sensitive indicator in evaluating the effect of stress in ecosystem.

As data sets of multiple types and scales proliferate, it will be increasingly important to be able to flexibly combine them in ways that retain relevant information. A case in point is Amazonia, a large, data-poor region where most whole-basin data sets are limited to understanding land cover interpreted through a variety of remote sensing techniques and sensors. A growing body of work, however, indicates that the future state of much of Amazonia depends on the land use to which converted areas are put, but land use in the tropics is difficult to assess from remotely sensed data alone.

Characterisation and mapping of land cover/land use within forest areas over long-multitemporal intervals is a complex task. This complexity is mainly due to the location and extent of such areas and, as a consequence, to the lack of full continuous cloud-free coverage of those large regions by one single remote sensing instrument. In order to provide improved long-multitemporal forest change detection using Landsat MSS and ETM + in part of Mt.

Scholars of pastoralism often refer to changes of pastoral land tenure as ‘encroachment.’ The New Zealand case of pastoral land tenure reform suggests that this is incorrect for several reasons. First it takes the point of view of the pastoralist, which introduces unnecessary bias. Second, it assumes that all changes in land tenure are situations in which the state, or another powerful agent, takes land away from the less powerful pastoralists.

PURPOSE: To assess the diverse environmental impacts of land use, a standardization of quantifying land use elementary flows is needed in life cycle assessment (LCA). The purpose of this paper is to propose how to standardize the land use classification and how to regionalize land use elementary flows. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In life cycle inventories, land occupation and transformation are elementary flows providing relevant information on the type and location of land use for land use impact assessment.

Coastal land use and land cover changes, emphasizing the alterations of coastal lagoons, were assessed in northwest Mexico using satellite imagery processing. Supervised classifications of a Landsat series (1973–1997) and the coefficients Kappa (K) and Tau (τ), were used to assess the area and verify the accuracy of the classification of six informational classes (urban area, aquatic systems, mangrove, agriculture, natural vegetation, and aquaculture). Pixel-by-pixel change detection among dates was evaluated using the Kappa Index of Agreement (KIA).