The ecological integrity of lotic ecosystems is intimately linked to the quality of their catchments. Environmental protection efforts should therefore be implemented at the relevant catchment-scale in order to support river biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Therefore, freshwater management can greatly benefit from tools that enable spatially-explicit predictions of water quality across heterogeneous landscapes.

Determining the performance of ecosystem services at the city or regional level cannot accurately take into account the fine differences between green or gray structures. The supply of regulating ecosystem services in, for instance, parks can differ as parks vary in their land cover composition. A comprehensive ecosystem service assessment approach also needs to reflect land use to consider the demands placed on ecosystem services, which are mostly neglected by current research yet important for urban planning.

Solid waste management is a worldwide problem and it is becoming more and more complicated day by day due to rise in population, industrialization as well as changes in our life style. Presently most of the waste generated is either disposed of in an open dump in developing countries or in landfills in the developed ones. Landfilling as well as open dumping requires lot of land mass and could also result in several environmental problems.

Much information on restoration and management exists for wet tropical forests of Central America but comparatively little work has been done in the dry forests of this region. Such information is critical for reforestation efforts that are now occurring throughout Central America. This paper describes processes of degradation due to land use and provides a conceptual framework for the restoration of dry tropical forest. Most of this forest type was initially harvested for timber and then cleared for cattle in the last century (1930–1970).

Objective scientific characteristics of present reclamation systems of Belarus have been done. Structure of reclamation lands has been analyzed. Distribution of reclaimed lands according to the types of irrigation and drainage systems has been presented. Reasons of insufficient usage of reclamation systems have been discovered. Mistakes that had been made on large-scale reclamation building have been estimated. Review of realization of the Republican programme “Preservation and usage of reclaimed lands” for 2001-2005 has been made.

The most important land and water issues facing North America and the world – including land‐use patterns, water management, biodiversity protection, and climate adaptation – require innovative governance arrangements. Most of these issues need to be addressed at several scales simultaneously, ranging from local to global. They require action at the scale of large landscapes given that the geographic scope of the issues often transcends the legal and geographic reach of existing jurisdictions and institutions.

Recently, the science and policy agenda on biodiversity moved to include ecosystem services assessments and it is recognised that for determining the effectiveness and progress of policy frameworks monitoring is crucial. Within European monitoring schemes, data is collected following different sampling protocols for a range of biodiversity or context related aspects; from EU-wide general land cover mapping to red list species within Annex I habitats.

This study investigates four decades of socio-economic and environmental change in a shifting cultivation landscape in the northern uplands of Laos. Historical changes in land cover and land use were analyzed using a chronological series of remote sensing data. Impacts of landscape change on local livelihoods were investigated in seven villages through interviews with various stakeholders.

Achievement of environmental management goals and objectives in coastal areas, including how to measure success, remains a significant subject for discussion among scholars and practitioners, meanwhile four distinct management efforts potentially converge within the coastal zone: land-use planning (LUP), river basin management (RBM), marine spatial planning (MSP) and integrated coastal management (ICM).

AIM: To disentangle whether long‐range periphery‐to‐core gradient of forest understorey plants could be attributed to past forest landscape and/or to current environmental filtering processes.

Population pressures and the need to optimize the use of limited available land has led to increasing cropping affluence levels within the maize agro-ecologies in Kenya, and a shift from large to smallholder intensification and multiple cropping patterns. Using a geographic information system, this study relates cropping patterns, by area share, maize productivity and household incomes across maize agro-ecologies, with the purpose to establish a decision support system for optimizing land allocation and in priority setting for introduction of new technologies such as Bt maize varieties.