Explorations of future land use change are important to understand potential conflicts between competing land uses, trade-offs associated with particular land change trajectories, and the effectiveness of policies to steer land systems into desirable states. Most model-based explorations and scenario studies focused on conversions in broad land use classes, but disregarded changes in land management or focused on individual sectors only.

The Thai government has ambitious plan to further promote the use of biodiesel. However, there has been insufficient consideration on the environmental effects of oil palm expansion in Thailand. This paper focuses on the effects of oil palm expansion on land use. We analysed the direct land use change (dLUC) and indirect land use change (iLUC) caused by the oil palm expansion and its effects on ecosystem services supply. Our analysis shows that between 2000 and 2009 dLUC related to oil palm expansion was more prevalent than iLUC.

The adoption of the EU land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) regulation ensures that for the first time afforestation in Europe will contribute toward the achievement of European Union (EU) climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement. However, increased afforestation in Europe could have unintended environmental trade-offs that may hamper the achievement of EU Water Framework Directive targets.

Colonisation by, and spread of, animal species from the temperate zone are rather uncommon observations in the tropics. The study provides the first reports of two snail species of the genus Zonitoides in Sabah, Borneo, namely Z. arboreus (Say, 1819) and Z. nitidus (O.F. Muller, 1774). The identification was aided using partial sequences of 28S rDNA, and the barcoding sequence of COI. So far, the two Zonitoides species were found in locations where the natural forest cover had been disturbed, and only in the montane forest at elevations between 1500 and 2000 m a.s.l..

Land use changes such as deforestation and urbanization influence the hydrology of catchments and hence water availability. Together with climate change, land use changes can affect the frequency of floods or droughts and thus threaten local or regional socio-economic development. For Indonesia, the effects of changes in land use and climate have been projected to cause a food crisis and eventually increase the degree of poverty in the future.

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.

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.

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.

The production of commodities such as palm oil and pulpwood is leading to large-scale land use change in the rural tropics to fulfil the demands of the increasing world population and overall living standard. On the one hand, such land use changes provide income to companies, smallholders and government actors. On the other hand, these can lead to land use conflicts and declines in forest cover, biodiversity, carbon stocks, and local food production.

Exposure to surface ozone has detrimental impacts on vegetation and crop yields. In this study, we estimate ozone impacts on crop production and subsequent impacts on land use in the 2005-2050 period using results of the TM5 atmospheric chemistry and IMAGE integrated assessment model. For the crops represented in IMAGE, we compute relative yield losses based on published exposure-response functions.

Background: Movement behaviour is fundamental to the ecology of animals and their interactions with other organisms, and as such contributes to ecosystem dynamics. Waterfowl are key players in ecological processes in wetlands and surrounding habitats through predator-prey interactions and their transportation of nutrients and other organisms. Understanding the drivers of their movement behaviour is crucial to predict how environmental changes affect their role in ecosystem functioning.