In human dominated landscapes, ecosystems are under increasing pressures caused by urbanization and infrastructure development. In Alpine valleys remnant natural areas are increasingly affected by habitat fragmentation and loss. In these contexts, there is a growing risk of local extinction for wildlife populations; hence assessing the consequences on biodiversity of proposed land use changes is extremely important. The article presents a methodology to assess the impacts of land use changes on target species at a local scale.

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has become a major source of water pollution. A combination of models would provide the necessary direction and approaches designed to control NPS pollution through land use planning. In this study, NPS pollution load was simulated in urban planning, historic trends and ecological protection land use scenarios based on the Conversion of Land Use and its Effect at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models applied to Hunhe-Taizi River Watershed, Liaoning Province, China.

Objective: The global obesity epidemic has been partially attributed to modern environments that encourage inactivity and overeating, yet few studies have examined specific features of the physical neighborhood environment that influence obesity. Using two different measurement methods, this study sought to identify and compare perceived and observed neighborhood indicators of obesity and a high-risk profile of being obese and inactive.

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has achieved remarkable development and so does the urbanization. However, there is an unavoidable contradiction between urban sprawl and the protection of arable land and the environment. By redefining the urban sprawl boundary, this paper is to provide a solution for the conflict above on the China’s urbanization context. The ideal boundary, moderate boundary and limit boundary are defined for urban sprawl in space.

This study evaluates how urban residents value variety, spatial configuration, and patterns of open space in their neighborhoods. Quantitative matrices that were borrowed from landscape ecology were first used to measure the variety and spatial arrangement of open space plots and landuses around houses. Amenity values of those measures were then evaluated in a hedonic regression that was corrected for identification problem caused by the endogeneity of landuse variables.

Rapid urbanization has induced numerous ecological and environmental issues seriously threatening the ecological security. The ecological security pattern (ESP), an effective way for protecting the ecological security, is becoming increasingly important in reconciling the rapid urbanization and ecology protection in urban planning practices.

The climate warming trend and city growth contribute to the generation of excessive heat in urban areas. This could be reduced by introducing vegetation and open water surfaces in urban design. This study evaluates the cooling efficiency of green and blue infrastructure to reduce urban heat load using a set of idealized case simulations and a real city model application for Vienna. The idealized case simulations show that the cooling effect of green and blue infrastructure is dependent on the building type, time of the day and in case of blue infrastructure, the water temperature.

Safe and sustainable management of waste presents a major challenge in cities in the Global South. For decades farmers in the peri-urban interface (PUI) have used biodegradable components of urban waste as inputs into their farming practices. Evidence from Kano, Nigeria; Kumasi, Ghana; Hubli-Dharwad and Kolkata, India reveals in rare detail how urban waste reuse plays an important role in the livelihood strategies of lower-income families nd while waste farming also contributes significantly to urban food security.

The need to develop approaches for risk-based management of soil contamination, as well as the integration of the assessment of the human health risk (HHR) due to the soil contamination in the urban planning procedures has been the subject of recent attention of scientific literature and policy makers. The spatial analysis of environmental data offers multiple advantages for studying soil contamination and HHR assessment, facilitating the decision making process.

The ways society use and occupy space occur in multiple dimensions; however, the ways we manage and administer space relies on two-dimensional information representations (2D). The legal ambiguity and administrative limitations inherent in such practices are becoming increasingly pronounced within land administration especially for urban areas.

Despite the fact that urban farming is widespread in many African cities there is not yet a clearly defined view on how to deal with these activities in urban planning and management. On the basis of field interviews in the rapidly expanding metropolitan area of Kampala (Uganda) three different urban farming types were identified: subsistence farming, garden farming and commercial farming. These three urban farming types have their own spatial organisation logic and each interact in a specific way with urban expansion.

An effective and efficient planning of an urban growth and land use changes and its impact on the environment requires information about growth trends and patterns amongst other important information. Over the years, many urban growth models have been developed and used in the developed countries for forecasting growth patterns. In the developing countries however, there exist a very few studies showing the application of these models and their performances.