Mountain regions meet an increasing demand for pleasant landscapes, offering many cultural ecosystem services to both their residents and tourists. As a result of global change, land managers and policy makers are faced with changes to this landscape and need efficient evaluation techniques to assess cultural ecosystem services. This study provides a spatially explicit modelling approach to estimating aesthetic landscape values by relating spatial landscape patterns to human perceptions via a photo-based survey.

Much of the coastal sage scrub habitat in Southern California that existed prior to European settlement has been developed for human uses. Over the past two to three decades, public agencies and land conservation organizations have worked to acquire some of the remaining lands for preservation. Many of these lands are degraded by past intensive livestock grazing, farming, and frequent fires, and the native flora has been replaced by weedy, exotic annual grasses and forbs, mostly of Mediterranean origin.

The absence of either state regulations or markets to coordinate the operation of individual wells has focussed attention on community level institutions as the primary loci for sustainable groundwater management in Rajasthan and Gujarat, India. The reported research relied on theoretical propositions that livelihood strategies, groundwater management and the propensity to cooperate are associated with the attitudinal orientations of well owners in the Meghraj and Dharta watersheds, located in Gujarat and Rajasthan respectively.

Tamale is the capital city of Ghana’s Northern Region. As the regional capital, Tamale is growing rapidly – the population has almost tripled to over 370,000 in the past 30 years, and the areal extent has increased up to sevenfold in the same period. Urban agriculture is an integral part of the food system, linked to resource management and spatial planning. In general one can say that backyard farming flourishes, but more formally organised production is threatened by urbanisation.

The Mali Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa RISING) Baseline Evaluation Survey (MARBES) survey was implemented during May-July 2014 as part of IFPRI’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of Africa RISING. The Africa RISING program aims to create-through action research and development partnerships-opportunities for smallholder farmers in Africa south of the Sahara to sustainably intensify their farming systems and to improve their food, nutrition, and income security.