The last National Forest Inventory of Sierra Leone took place more than four decades ago in 1975. There appears to be no legal definition of “forest” in Sierra Leone and it is sometimes unclear whether reports are referring to the forest as a “land use” or a “land cover”.

Land evaluation is a process that is aimed at the sustainable development of agricultural production in rural areas, especially in developing countries. Therefore, land evaluation involves many aspects of natural conditions, economic, and social issues. This research was conducted in a hilly region of Central Vietnam to assess the land suitability of potential agricultural land use types that are based on scientific and local knowledge.

Uyo is one of the fastest-growing cities in Nigeria. In recent years, there has been a widespread change in land use, yet to date, there is no thorough mapping of vegetation change across the area. This study focuses on land use change, urban development, and the driving forces behind natural vegetation loss in Uyo.

Anthropogenic activities have substantially changed natural landscapes, especially in regions which are extremely affected by population growth and climate change such as East African countries. Understanding the patterns of land-use and land-cover (LULC) change is important for efficient environmental management, including effective water management practice. Using remote sensing techniques and geographic information systems (GIS), this study focused on changes in LULC patterns of the upstream and downstream Wami River Basin over 16 years.

The present study revealed how local socioecological knowledge elucidated during participatory rural appraisals and historical remote sensing data can be combined for analyzing land use change patterns from 1954 to 2007 in northwestern Vietnam. The developed approach integrated farmer decision rules on cropping preferences and location, visual and supervised classification methods, and qualitative information obtained during various forms of participatory appraisals.

This study analyzed and assessed spatio-temporal dynamics of land-use change (LUC) and urban expansion (UE) within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) of Ghana. This region serves as a case to illustrate how a major economic hub and political core area is experiencing massive spatial transformations, resulting in uneven geographies of urban land expansion. Quickbird/Worldview-2 images for the years 2008 and 2017 were segmented and classified to produce LUC maps. LUC and UE were analyzed by post-classification change detection and spatial metrics, respectively.

Participatory mapping is a valuable approach for documenting the influence of human activities on species, ecosystems, and ecosystem services, as well as the variability of human activities over space and time. This method is particularly valuable in data-poor systems; however, there has never been a systematic approach for identifying the total number of respondents necessary to map the entire spatial extent of a particular human activity. Here, we develop a new technique for identifying sufficient respondent sample sizes for participatory mapping by adapting species rarefaction curves.

Preliminary findings on the effects of land use in the Masinga Dam catchment, Kenya, on the storage capacity of the reservoir are presented. Remote sensing and GIS techniques, supplemented with ground reports, were used to determine areas most susceptible to erosion. A representative catchment was then chosen for rainy season monitoring of soil loss, river suspended sediments and discharge response to rainfall. In addition, Gerlach-type traps were used to evaluate erosion rates under different crop covers and slope gradients.

Many actors in agricultural research, development, and policy arenas require accurate information on the spatial extents of cropping and farming practices. While remote sensing provides ways for obtaining such information, it is often difficult to distinguish between different types of agricultural practices or identify particular farming systems. Stochastic system behavior or similarity in the spectral signatures of different system components can lead to misclassification.

Drastic growth of urban populations has caused expansion of peri-urban areas—the transitional zone between a city and its hinterland. Although urbanisation may bring economic opportunities and improve infrastructure in an area, uncontrolled urban expansion towards peri-urban areas will negatively impact the environment and the community living within the area. Malaysia, for example, has become one of the most urbanised countries in East Asia. However, cities in Malaysia are relatively small and less densely populated compared with other cities in East Asia.

Low adoption of sustainable intensification technologies hinders achievement of their potential impacts on increasing agricultural productivity. Proper targeting of locations to scale-out particular technologies is a key determinant of the rate of adoption. Targeting locations with similar biophysical and socio-economic characteristics significantly increases the probability of adoption. Areas with similar biophysical and socio-economic characteristics are referred to as recommendation domains (RDs).

This study examined the trends, driving factors, and implications of land use/land cover (LULC) dynamics over the past 35 years (1982–2017) in three watersheds of the drought-prone areas that represent different agro-ecologies of Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia: Guder (highland), Aba Gerima (midland), and Debatie (lowland). The changes in LULC were analyzed by integrating field observations, remote-sensing data (aerial photographs [1: 50,000 scale] and very high resolution [0.5–3.2 m] satellite images), and geographic information systems.