The Polish Carpathians, like many mountain areas in Europe, are currently facing dynamic land use changes that will shape their future landscapes. As there are many different possible scenarios of potential change, we compared three different land use scenarios up until the year 2060 and assessed their impact on the potential habitat connectivity of two large carnivores—wolf (Canis lupus) and lynx (Lynx lynx). We first analysed the main directions of change within and outside the pan-European wildlife corridor located in the western part of the Polish Carpathians.

In this paper, we review the potential of biocultural heritage in biodiversity protection and agricultural innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. We begin by defining the concept of biocultural heritage into four interlinked elements that are revealed through integrated landscape analysis. This concerns the transdisciplinary methods whereby biocultural heritage must be explored, and here we emphasise that reconstructing landscape histories and documenting local heritage values needs to be an integral part of the process.

In this article, we first summarise trends of land use changes and urbanisation in Ireland since 1990 using data from the Corine Land Cover program. In doing so, we compare the developments in Ireland with other European countries. Second, we propose a statistical test for the presence of sprawl using conditional and unconditional convergence tests. The two-part empirical analysis allows us to establish that Ireland has experienced a substantial loss of non-urban land in recent decades.