Environmental services of biodiversity, clean water, etc., have been considered byproducts of farming and grazing, but population pressures and a move from rural to peri-urban areas are changing land use practices, reducing these services and increasing land degradation. A range of ecosystem markets have been reversing this damage, but these are not widely institutionalized, so land managers do not see them as “real” in the way they do for traditional food and fiber products.

Over the past 40 years, roads have been the main driver behind the State of Acre’s occupation and development. However, the expansion of roads, has often been associated with the advance of deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and social conflicts. There are no up-to-date data available on the current extent of Acre’s road network nor its environmental and socioenvironmental impacts. In this study, we updated the State of Acre’s road network map for the period 2007 to 2019 through the visual interpretation of 153 Landsat images (5, 7, and 8) at a scale of 1:50,000.

This paper provides an overview of the last 40 years of use, and in many cases abuse, of the natural resources in Catalonia, a country that is representative of European countries in general, and especially those in the Mediterranean region. It analyses the use of natural resources made by mining, agriculture, livestock, logging, fishing, nature tourism, and energy production and consumption.

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.

Cattle grazing and fire are common types of management on natural ecosystems, generating several threats to the conservation of native vegetation (e.g., changes in species richness, cover, and abundance, mainly of bovine-palatable species). In this work, we analysed the response of the structure and composition of vegetation managed with different cattle stocking rates and fire in the savanna ecosystems of Colombia. The study was located in the eastern area of the Llanos region, where savannas were subjected to grazing and burning.

Urbanization poses a major threat to biodiversity worldwide. We focused on birds as a well-studied taxon of interest, in order to review literature on traits that influence responses to urbanization. We review 226 papers that were published between 1979 and 2020, and aggregate information on five major groups of traits that have been widely studied: ecological traits, life history, physiology, behavior and genetic traits. Some robust findings on trait changes in individual species as well as bird communities emerge.

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.

Urban growth is a largely debated issue in social science. Specific forms of metropolitan expansion—including sprawl—involve multiple and fascinating research dimensions, making mixed (quali-quantitative) analysis of this phenomenon particularly complex and challenging at the same time. Urban sprawl has attracting the attention of multidisciplinary studies defining nature, dynamics, and consequences that dispersed low-density settlements are having on biophysical and socioeconomic contexts worldwide.

The present study focuses on identifying and describing the possible proximate and underlying causes of deforestation and its factors using the combination of two techniques: (1) specialized consultation and (2) spatial logistic regression modeling. These techniques were implemented to characterize the deforestation process qualitatively and quantitatively, and then to graphically represent the deforestation process from a temporal and spatial point of view. The study area is the North Pacific Basin, Mexico, from 2002 to 2014.

Forest classifications by disturbance permit designation of multiple types of both old growth forests and shorter-lived forests, which auto-replace under severe disturbance, and also identification of loss of the disturbance type and associated forest. Historically, fire and flooding disturbance regimes, or conversely, infrequent disturbance, produced unique forests such as disturbance-independent forests of American beech (Fagus grandifolia), eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), and sugar maple (Acer saccharum) in the Eastern United States.

Today, the design and remodeling of urban environments is being sought in order to achieve green, healthy, and sustainable cities. The effect of air pollution in cities due to vehicle combustion gases is an important part of the problem. Due to the indirect effect caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, political powers in Europe have imposed confinement measures for citizens by imposing movement restrictions in large cities. This indirect measure has given us a laboratory to show how the reduction in vehicle circulation affects in a short time the levels of air pollution in cities.

Planning the adaptation of agriculture and forestry landscapes to climate change remains challenging due to the need for integrating substantial amounts of information. This information ranges from climate scenarios, geographical site information, socio-economic data and several possible adaptation measures. Thus, there is an urgent need to have a framework that is capable of organizing adaptation strategies and measures in the agriculture and forestry sectors in Mediterranean climatic regions.