Support for large scale agricultural investments in Africa has been mainly premised on their employment prospects for local populations. However, despite earlier calls by Tania Li to centre labour in the land grabs debate, labour is generally invisible in both mainstream policy and academic research. This paper, through a governance lens, draws attention to the implications of the global land rush on wage labour.

Over the last two decades, Georgia has made impressive progress in economic growth and reforms. These advancements have also brought about an increase in investments and infrastructure as well as in service sectors, such as tourism, that provide a potential for future growth and welfare. Georgia’s leaders and society have also recognized that the pursuit of growth depends on the sustainability of its development path. Sustainability, in turn, hinges on the protection of the country’s most valuable assets –its nature, people, and cultural heritage.

This paper explores multi-stakeholder perspectives on the extent to which forestry projects that pursue ecological restoration and rehabilitation in Madagascar engage with local communities and can co-deliver climate-development benefits. Drawing on mixed methods (policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory site visits and focus groups) in two different forestry contexts, we show that by strengthening access to capital availability, projects can enhance local adaptive capacity and mitigation and deliver local development.

This paper presents the results of 39 years of observations conducted at the Chabyda station to monitor the thermal state of permafrost landscapes under current climatic warming. The analysis of long-term records from weather stations in the region has revealed one of the highest increasing trends in mean annual air temperature in northern Russia. The partitioning of the energy balance in different landscape units within the study area has been analyzed.

The suburban territories of large cities are transitional zones where intensive transformations in land use are constantly taking place. Therefore, the presented work is devoted to an integrated assessment of land use changes in the Shortandy district (Kazakhstan) based on an integrated study of the dynamics of land use and sustainable development indicators (SDIs). It was found that the main tendency in the land use of this Peri-urban area (PUA) during 1992–2018 is their intensification, through an increase in arable lands.

This paper presents a new approach for rapidly assessing the extent of land use and land cover (LULC) areas in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. The novel idea is the use of an annual time series of fraction images derived from the linear spectral mixing model (LSMM) instead of original bands. The LSMM was applied to the Project for On-Board Autonomy-Vegetation (PROBA-V) 100-m data composites from 2015 (~73 scenes/year, cloud-free images, in theory), generating vegetation, soil, and shade fraction images. These fraction images highlight the LULC components inside the pixels.

Cities have a wide variety of green infrastructure types, such as parks and gardens. These structures can provide important ecosystem services (ES) with a major impact on human well-being. With respect to urban planning, special consideration must be given to such green infrastructure types when implementing measures to maintain and enhance the quality of life. Therefore, generating knowledge on the urban ES of differently scaled green infrastructure types is important.

Landscape research involves a large number of scientific disciplines. Different disciplinary and scale approaches have led to the creation of numerous land use/land cover databases with different classification nomenclature. It is very important for end-users of databases to know the capabilities and limits of land use/land cover data to avoid potential mistakes resulting from inappropriate combinations and interpretations.

Measuring, monitoring, and managing biodiversity across agricultural regions depends on methods that can combine high-resolution mapping of landscape patterns with local biodiversity observations. This study explores the potential to monitor biodiversity in agricultural landscapes by linking high-resolution remote sensing with passive acoustic monitoring.

Human populations and their use of land have reshaped landscapes for thousands of years, creating the anthropogenic biomes (anthromes) that now cover most of the terrestrial biosphere. Here we introduce the first global reconstruction and mapping of anthromes and their changes across the 12,000-year interval from 10,000 BCE to 2015 CE; the Anthromes 12K dataset.

Seoul, a city in South Korea, experiences high particulate matter (PM) levels well above the recommended standards suggested by the World Health Organization. As concerns about public health and everyday lives are being raised, this study investigates the effects of land use on PM levels in Seoul. Specifically, it attempts to identify which land use types increase or decrease PM10 and PM2.5 levels and compare the effects between high and low seasons using two sets of land use classifications: one coarser and the other finer.

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is a biotically important region of grassland, wetland, and cropland that traverses the Canada-US border. Significant amounts of grasslands and wetlands within the PPR have been converted to croplands in recent years due to increasing demand for biofuels. We characterized land dynamics across the US portion of the PPR (US–PPR) using the USDA Crop Data Layer (CDL) for 2006–2018. We also conducted a comparative analysis between two epochs (1998–2007 & 2008–2017) of the CDL data time series in the North Dakotan portion of the US–PPR.