Changes in agricultural policy may have a rapid impact, even on landscapes which have taken millennia to form. Here we explore the potential impact of the UK leaving the EU as a catalyst for profound changes in the pastoral landscapes of Wales. Impending change of the trading regime governing agricultural produce, concurrent with public pressure to use agricultural subsidies for environmental goals, may lead to unforeseen consequences for the Welsh natural environment.

Protected areas are places that provide diverse ecosystem services, including cultural ecosystem services. At the same time, the development and unbalanced use of natural resources in protected areas often create environmental threats and social conflicts. This study estimates the economic value of environmental consequences derived from the construction of an airport in a national park in Korea.

Implementation of the Grain for Green program (GGP) intensifies land use/cover change (LUCC) in the loess hilly-gully region. Clarifying the response of LUCC to the GGP and its driving forces are basic premises to implement the GGP more effectively for alleviating soil erosion in this region. This study analyzed the spatio-temporal characteristics of conversion of cultivated land to forest land and grassland in two study periods of 2000–2010 and 2010–2018.

The unprecedented growth of cities has a significant impact on future flood risk that might exceed the impacts of climate change in many metropolitan areas across the world. Although the effects of urbanisation on flood risk are well understood, assessments that include spatially explicit future growth projections are limited. This comparative study provides insight in the long term development of future riverine and pluvial flood risk for 18 fast growing megacities.

Context: Climate change can directly affect habitats within ecological networks, but may also have indirect effects on network quality by inducing land use change. The relative impact of indirect effects of climate change on the quality of ecological networks currently remains largely unknown. Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine the relative impact of direct and indirect effects of climate change on a network of breeding habitat of four meadow bird species (Black-tailed godwit, Common redshank, Eurasian oystercatcher and Northern lapwing) in the Netherlands.

Cropland expansion threatens biodiversity by driving habitat loss and impacts carbon storage through loss of biomass and soil carbon (C). There is a growing concern land use change (LUC) to cropland will result in a loss of ecosystem function and various ecosystem services essential for human health and wellbeing. This paper examines projections of future cropland expansion from an integrated assessment model IMAGE 3.0 under a 'business as usual' scenario and the direct impact on both biodiversity and C storage.

Context: Both global change and policy reform will affect the implementation of the National Ecological Network (NEN) in the Netherlands. Global change refers to a combination of changing groundwater tables arising from climate change and improved economic prospects for farming. Policy reform refers to the abolition of an intermediary organization that organizes land trades with the support of a national land bank. Objective: In this paper we evaluate the effects of these factors on future land acquisition for the NEN.

The transition from fossil to renewable energy needs changes in land use. The development of renewable energy sources introduce extra and sometimes new externalities, such as shadows and noise on landscape. There are governments who are experiencing difficulties when developing renewable energy sources especially when existing land owners (and others) start anticipating on those externalities. Therewith, land use conflicts have become a major issue for governments in meeting renewable energy policy objectives.

Land use change is a central issue in the sustainability debate, because of its impacts on e.g. climate change, water availability and quality, soil quality and erosion, and biodiversity. Continuing population growth, shifting diets towards higher meat consumption and increasing bioenergy demands call for the exploration of possibilities for sustainable land use change pathways with minimal negative impacts. Land use change models are tools that support such explorations by projecting the spatial dynamics of a predefined set of land uses over a given period.

Process-based spatio-temporal component models simulate real world processes, using encapsulated process representations that operate at individual spatial and temporal discretisations. These component models act as building blocks in the construction of multi-disciplinary, multi-scale integrated models. Coupling these independent component models, however, involves aggregation or disaggregation of the exchanged variables at model runtime, since each of the component models exposes potentially different spatial and temporal discretisations.

A spatially explicit land use change model is typically based on the assumption that the relationship between land use change and its explanatory processes is stationary. This means that model structure and parameterization are usually kept constant over the model runtime, ignoring potential systemic changes in this relationship resulting from societal changes.