Present day Australian landscapes are legacies of our colonial history, while future landscapes will be legacies of ecological processes and human impacts occurring today. This paper investigates the legacies of European settlement of Noosa Shire, South-east Queensland, with particular emphasis on the economic and political drivers and the resultant loss and fragmentation of Koala Phascolarctos cinereus habitat.

Data from many countries show that the concentration of poverty and malnutrition is shifting from rural to urban areas. Although many rural people move to the cities seeking to improve their well-being, they often remain mired in poverty and squalor. Rampant violence, flimsy housing, and filthy living conditions, along with hunger and malnutrition, are becoming the daily lot for more and more people as cities grow.

The objectives of this Colorado study were to assess primary reasons ranchers choose to stay or sell the ranch, compare the motivations for ranching between a traditional agriculturally based county and a rapidly developing county, and assess whether factors such as length of tenure, fiscal dependency on ranching, and dependency on public lands play roles in decisions to sell. Personal interviews were conducted with 37 ranchers. While land use conversion occurs for a wide variety of reasons, lack of heirs and detrimental public policy were important reasons given for selling ranches.

A methodology is developed to relate urban growth studies to distributed hydrological modeling using an integrated approach of remote sensing and GIS. This linkage is possible because both studies share land-use and land-cover data. Landsat Thematic Mapper data are utilized to detect urban land-cover changes. GIS analyses are then conducted to examine the changing spatial patterns of urban growth. The integration of remote sensing and GIS is applied to automate the estimation of surface runoff based on the Soil Conservation Service model.

Met het in de Vijfde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening voorgestelde beleid, worden de waardevolle landschappen in Nederland de komende 20 jaar vooralsnog onvoldoende beschermd tegen de oprukkende verstedelijking. Bij continuering van de huidige trends en zonder aanvullend beleid gaat in 2020 door verstedelijking ruim 20␟an de waardevolle landschappen verloren. Met name landschappen in de Noordvleugel van de Randstad en de provincie Utrecht staan onder druk. Het kabinet stelt in de Vijfde Nota wel doelen voor het behoud van landschap en introduceert onder meer het instrument 'groene contouren'.