The economic value of the Upper Tuul ecosystem in Mongolia reports on a study carried out under the auspices of the World Bank and the Government of Mongolia. The goal of the study was to improve understanding about the economic value of the Upper Tuul ecosystem for Ulaanbaatar's water supplies and how this might be affected by different land and resource management options in the future.

In the past few decades there has been an increasing pressure of population all over the world, especially in India, resulting in the utilization of every available patch of available land from woodlands to badlands. The study area represents a basin which is economically growing fast by converting the fallow lands, badlands and woodlands to agricultural land for the past few decades.

Terminos Lagoon ecosystem is the largest fluvial-lagoon estuarine system in the country and one of the most important reserves of coastal flora and fauna in Mexico. Since the seventies, part of the main infrastructure for country's oil extraction is located in this area. Its high biodiversity has motivated different type of studies including deforestation processes and land use planning. In this work we used satellite image analysis to determine land cover changes in the area from 1974 to 2001.

Remote sensing is the main technology for assessing expansion and rate of land cover changes. Knowing the different kinds of land cover changes and human activities in different parts of lands, as the base information for different planning is especially important. In this study, the land cover changes of Isfahan city that is consist of Isfahan and its` surrounded area was studied for the past 4 decades.

La expansión acelerada de las áreas urbanas no es algo nuevo para las ciudades latinoamericanas. Sin embargo, es sólo ahora que las profundas implicaciones sociales, ecológicas y económicas de la dispersión urbana empiezan a convertirse en una preocupación fundamental de las grandes aglomeraciones del continente. El presente artículo toma a Santiago de Chile como ejemplo para discutir los desafíos que la dispersión urbana supone para la gobernanza.

 tesis que para obtener el grado de Doctor en Geografía, presenta Maria Inés Mombelli Pierini ; asesor José Omar Moncada Maya. 231 páginas : ilustraciones. Doctorado en Geografía UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2009

We quantified potential biases associated with lakes monitored using non-probability based sampling by six state agencies in the USA (Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, and New Hampshire). To identify biases, we compared state-monitored lakes to a census population of lakes derived from the National Hydrography Dataset. We then estimated the probability of lakes being sampled using generalized linear mixed models.

The effect of land cover change, from natural to anthropogenic, on physical geography conditions has been studied in Kayisdagi Mountain. Land degradation is the most important environmental issue involved in this study. Most forms of land degradation are natural processes accelerated by human activity. Land degradation is a human induced or natural process that negatively affects the ability of land to function effectively within an ecosystem.

The most obvious, although not exclusive, explanation for the increase of species richness with increasing sample area (the species-area relationship) is that species richness is ultimately linked to area-based increases in habitat heterogeneity. The aim of this paper is to examine the relative importance of area and habitat heterogeneity in determining species richness in nature reserves. Specifically, the work tests the hypothesis that species-area relationships are not positive if habitat heterogeneity does not increase with area.

The conversion of native habitats to pasture and other working lands, unbuilt lands modified by humans for production, is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. While some human-dominated landscapes on continents support relatively high native biodiversity, this capacity is little studied in oceanic island systems characterized by high endemism and vulnerability to invasion.

Soils with pedogenic carbonate cover about 30% (3.44 x 10⁶ km²) of China, mainly across its arid and semiarid regions in the Northwest. Based on the second national soil survey (1979-1992), total soil inorganic carbon (SIC) storage in China was estimated to be 53.3±6.3 PgC (1 Pg=10¹⁵ g) to the depth investigated to 2 m. Soil inorganic carbon storages were 4.6, 10.6, 11.1, and 20.8 Pg for the depth ranges of 0-0.1, 0.1-0.3, 0.3-0.5, and 0.5-1 m, respectively. Stocks for 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, and 1 m of depth accounted for 8.7%, 28.7%, 49.6%, and 88.9% of total SIC, respectively.