The provision of ecosystem services at the landscape level can be significantly influenced by land management practices. Within an agriculturally dominated case study area in Saxony, Germany, a more detailed land use classification, which includes differentiated information on agricultural management practices, was utilized within the raster-based planning support tool GISCAME. “Management” refers to typical, regional crop rotations and soil tillage practices.

Identifying the primary causes and examining the processes and trends of land use change are crucial for land use planning, utilization of regional resources and environment management. Combining the ecological quantity analysis with GIS technology, based on the land use data and remote sense images, the changes of land use and land cover and the driving force were analyzed in the mainstream of the Tarim River from 1973 to 2005.

Increasing competition over the world's forest resources will likely aggravate conflict, though conflict should not be seen as bad per se. As the challenge is to develop institutions and practices capable of handling conflict constructively, various collaborative approaches involving disputing actors are evolving worldwide. In Sweden, most such approaches pertain to protected areas and few involve commercial forestry.

Since the late 1970s, transitions in socioeconomic status and new governmental policies have led to drastic changes in agricultural land use types and farm management practices across rural China, such as an increase in the area of land cultivated for cash–crops (e.g. vegetables and orchards) and intensive fertilization and irrigation of this land. How this more intensive management and land use for the more profitable cash crops affects soil nutrients is of great concern for carbon, soil and water quality management.

Marginal land provides an alternative potential for food and bioenergy production in the face of limited land resources; however, effective assessment of marginal lands is not well addressed. Concerns over environmental risks, ecosystem services and sustainability for marginal land have been widely raised. The objective of this study was to develop a hierarchical marginal land assessment framework for land use planning and management.

Including a diverse set of stakeholders in collaborative land use planning processes is facilitated by data and maps that communicate and inform an array of possible planning options and potential scenarios of future land use change. In northern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) has engaged stakeholders and the DRC Government to lead a participatory zoning process in the Maringa–Lopori–Wamba (MLW) Landscape.

This longitudinal case study of residential development pressure in a village in Glasgow's urban fringe provides detailed insight into the different perspectives of key public, private and community interest groups, and exemplifies the conflict resolution process in this environment in the context of the new post-2006 planning system in Scotland. The paper is organised into six main parts. In part 1 the major actors in the residential development process are identified with specific attention focused on the house-builder and the local planner.

Open space protection is increasingly being used for flood mitigation at the local level. However, little if any empirical research has been conducted on the effectiveness of this land use policy in terms of reducing actual damage caused by floods. Our study addresses this issue by statistically examining the performance of open space dedicated for flood mitigation purposes across a nationally representative sample of local jurisdictions.

Decision support to develop viable climate change adaptation strategies for agriculture and regional land use management encompasses a wide range of options and issues. Up to now, only a few suitable tools and methods have existed for farmers and regional stakeholders that support the process of decision-making in this field. The interactive model-based spatial information and decision support system LandCaRe DSS attempts to close the existing methodical gap.

This article reports on the results of an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of a set of collaborative spatial decision support tools developed to support a land use allocation problem in a peat-meadow polder in the Netherlands. The tools feature spatial multicriteria analysis as the means to make spatially explicit trade-offs between stakeholder objectives in three different ways: as colors on multiple printed maps, qualitatively on a single digital map and quantitatively on a single digital map.

In a context where several sectors of society compete for space, land use types must be carefully designed and spatially allocated to guarantee a sufficient level of relevant ecosystem services (ES) in a territory of interest. In this respect, contemporary land use planning involves multiple, often conflicting objectives and criteria. Consequently, major benefits can be expected from spatial decision support systems (sDSS) designed to deal with complex spatial allocation problems.

In Latin America countries, competition for access to natural resources among different groups has been a major reason for the outburst of violence over the last decades. One of the main aims of the political ecology concerns the understanding of the environmental conditions that can underlies the social conflict among people. Such understanding needs to be based on a detailed investigation of the natural resources of the landscape, mainly the soils.