Amphibians worldwide are facing rapid declines due to habitat loss and fragmentation, disease, and other causes. Where habitat alteration is implicated, there is a need for spatially explicit conservation plans. Models built with geographic information systems (GIS) are frequently used to inform such planning. We explored the potential for using GIS models of functional landscape connectivity as a reliable proxy for genetically derived measures of population isolation.

Research has demonstrated that landscape or watershed scale processes can influence instream aquatic ecosystems, in terms of the impacts of delivery of fine sediment, solutes and organic matter. Testing such impacts upon populations of organisms (i.e. at the catchment scale) has not proven straightforward and differences have emerged in the conclusions reached.

Facing the changes in the agricultural sector as well as new growing demands from society in relation to the European countryside, new questions emerge as to the management of the agricultural landscapes. The multiple combination of production with the support of multiple functions is a challenge for present day management. Tools are needed that make it possible to assess how a certain landscape can support in particular cultural and amenity functions, those that directly depend on the public preferences.

The 921 earthquake caused a catastrophic disaster in Central Taiwan. Ten years have passed since the earthquake occurred. Vegetation succession is the basis for establishing a restoration reference which plays an important role in vegetation restoration at landslide sites. Generally, growth conditions for grass are easier and the growth rate is faster than that for trees. Therefore, grass can be considered a pioneer species or an important reference for the early vegetation succession stage. This is the reason why grass is required to be extracted from other land covers.

The semiarid Chinese Loess Plateau is notorious for severe drought, water erosion, and environmental degradation. Changes in landscape patterns and rainfall are key drivers that determine the dynamics of runoff loss and sediment yield from catchments. These factors have crucial implications for management of other fragile ecosystems around the globe. In this study, responses of surface runoff and sediment yield to land use and rainfall in a typical loess hilly catchment in 1997, 2005, and 2010 were analyzed. Several major findings are highlighted.

Native arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi associated with grass and legume cover crops established on Oxisol soils in the Colombian piedmont (Meta) were identified morphologically and the ability to colonize was evaluated. The experimental area consisted of cover crops Arachis pintoi (CIAT 18744), Brachiaria brizantha cv. Toledo, B. dictyoneura cv. Llanero, Desmodium ovalifolium cv. Maquenque, Panicum maximum (CIAT 36000), Paspalum notatum, and a chemical control (Glyphosate and mechanical control) established in the rows in a Valencia orange grove.

Land use has significantly changed during the recent decades at global and local scale, while the importance of ecosystems as sources/sinks of C has been highlighted, emphasizing the global impact of land use changes. Land use changes can increase C loss rates which are extremely difficult to reverse, in the short term, opposite to organic carbon (OC) which accumulates in soil in the long-term. The aim of this research is to improve and test methodologies to assess land cover change (LCC) dynamics and temporal and spatial variability in C stored in vegetation at a wide scale.

Land use change as conversion pasture to forest produces several changes on hydrological cycle. In this paper, we analyse the effects on stream discharge of afforestation of a small watershed devoted to pasture using the HBV hydrological model. Streamflow data obtained over the first 10 years after planting were employed to evaluate the capacity of HBV model to simulate hydrological behaviour of catchment after afforestation. Obtained results indicate that the estimation of streamflow was accurate as reflected by statistics (R² = 0.90, NSC = 0.89 and PBIAS = 0.34).

To improve the understandings on regional climatic effects of past human-induced land cover changes, the surface albedo changes caused by conversions from natural vegetation to cropland were estimated across northeastern China over the last 300 years, and its climatic effects were simulated by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Essential natural vegetation records compiled from historical documents and regional optimal surface albedo dataset were used.

The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called 'landscape mosaic' as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km2 study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible landscape mosaic classes according to the proportions of natural, developed, and agriculture land-cover types in a surrounding 4.41-ha neighborhood.

Land-cover change in the conterminous United States was quantified by interpreting change from satellite imagery for a sample stratified by 84 ecoregions. Gross and net changes between 11 land-cover classes were estimated for 5 dates of Landsat imagery (1973, 1980, 1986, 1992, and 2000). An estimated 673,000km²(8.6%) of the United States’ land area experienced a change in land cover at least one time during the study period. Forest cover experienced the largest net decline of any class with 97,000km² lost between 1973 and 2000.

In 2000, after the international agreement on the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization decided to adopt a new set of basic forest and forest change definitions. The main change is that new definitions are no more related to land cover but to land use. The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol requires now that national forest related data must be based on land use concept.