This Order establishes that granting on lease of the plots of land located within functional areas of national parks for recreational use shall be carried out in accordance with the Federal legislation on land and protected areas. Object of lease can be the following functional areas of national parks: (a) areas of tourism and education; (b) recreational areas; and (c) tourist service areas. Lease contract shall be approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology.

This Decree establishes the modalities of estimate and calculation of rates of permissible impact on protected areas in the process of performance of tourism, recreational and healthcare activities. The scope of determination of rates of permissible impact shall be conservation of ecosystems, biological diversity and landscape diversity of protected areas. The aforesiad rates shall be established by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection at the suggestion of state bodies managing protected areas.

This Regional Law regulates relations in the sphere of organization, conservation, protection and functioning of protected areas of regional significance for the purpose of conservation of natural resources potential, healthcare, tourist and recreational resources, landscape and biological diversity, and promotion of ecological education of the population. Regional protected areas shall be classified as follows: (a) natural parks; (b) state nature reserves; (c) nature monuments; (d) dendrological parks and botanical gardens; and (e) healthcare areas and health resorts.

This Governmental Decree classifies areas of state natural parks in three categories: (a) protected; (b) ecologically stabilizing; (c) tourist and recreational; and (d) area of limited economic activity. Any activity causing deterioration and exhaustion of natural resources and objects and also violating different protection regimes shall be prohibited on the territory of state natural parks.

Article 6.1 shall be amended to add the following wording: “The following protected areas of local significance shall be set up on the regional territory: (a) tourist and recreational areas; and (b) protected natural complexes”.

Amends: Regional Law No. 39-OZ “On protected areas”. (2013-07-02)

Recently, droughts have become widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, including in Mongolia. The ground surface condition, particularly vegetation coverage, affects the occurrence of dust storms. The main sources of dust storms in the Asian region are the Taklimakan and Mongolian Gobi desert regions. In these regions, precipitation is one of the most important factors for growth of plants especially in arid and semi-arid land. The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between precipitation and vegetation cover dynamics over 29 years in the Gobi region.

Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such one-dimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, high spatial and temporal resolution data with global coverage can be used to measure and represent the landscape qualities of urban environments.

Accounting for one quarter of China’s land area, the endorheic Shiyang River basin is a vast semi-arid to arid region in China’s northwest. Exploring the impact of changes in land use on this arid area’s carbon budget under global warming is a key component to global climate change research. Variation in the region’s soil carbon storage due to land use changes occurring between 1973 and 2012 was estimated. The results show that land use change has a significant impact on the soil carbon budget, with soil carbon storage having decreased by 3.89 Tg between 1973 and 2012.

Landscape character assessment (LCA) has a significant contribution to make as a spatial framework for the emerging concept of ‘multi-functional landscapes’, a landscape providing a range of functions, services, and human-derived benefits. The paper reviews the development of LCA in Northwest Europe with a brief description of more recent LCA projects in a Mediterranean context. This is followed by a comparative description of the Living Landscapes approach developed in the UK as applied to Cyprus.

Land use/land cover maps derived from remotely sensed imagery are often insufficient in quality for some quantitative application purposes due to a variety of reasons such as spectral confusion. Although object-based classification has some advantages over pixel-based classification in identifying relatively homogeneous land use/cover areas from medium resolution remotely sensed images, the classification accuracy is usually still relatively low.

Quantitative reconstructions of past land use facilitate comparisons between livelihoods in space and time. However, comparison between different types of land use strategies is challenging as land use has a multitude of expressions and intensities. The quantitative method presented here facilitates the exploration and synthetization of uneven archaeological and textual evidence from past societies.