Population growth, urbanisation and climate change represent significant pressures on urban water resources, requiring water managers to consider a wider array of management options that account for economic, social and environmental factors.

Land cover changes affect local surface energy balances by changing the amount of solar energy reflected, the magnitude and duration over which absorbed energy is released as heat, and the amount of energy that is diverted to non-heating fluxes through evaporation. However, such local influences often are only crudely included in climate modeling exercises, if at all. A better understanding of local land conversion dynamics can serve to inform inputs for climate models and increase the role for land use planning in climate management policy.

Assessing the driving forces of sandy desertification is fundamental and important for its control. It has been widely accepted that both climatic conditions and land use have great impact on sandy desertification in northern China. However, the relative role and synergistic effect of each driving force of sandy desertification are still not clear. In this paper, an indicator named as SI was defined to represent the integrated probability of sandy desertification caused by land use.

Karst terrains are generally regarded as a fragile and vulnerable environment. China’s karst is mainly developed in pre-Triassic, old-phase, hard, compact carbonate rock. The lack of soil cover in bare karst land can enhance desertification. Its underground drainage system can aggravate both drought and flooding problems; the interconnected surface and subsurface conditions allow for easy contamination by pollutants.

The overexploitation of natural resources, resulting in an increased need for arable lands by local populations, causes a serious dysfunction in the soil's biological functioning (mineral deficiency, salt stress, etc.). This dysfunction, worsened by the climatic conditions (drought), requires the implementation of ecological engineering strategies allowing the rehabilitation of degraded areas through the restoration of essential ecological services.

Land use and land cover changes (LUCC) are recognized as one of the most relevant drivers of biodiversity loss in ecosystems. Through the analysis of satellite images, this article quantifies the LUCC that occurred between 1985 and 2008 in the Colombian Andes. Four submodels of changes were analyzed: deforestation, crop intensification, conversion to pastures, and abandonment.

South America’s drylands remain some of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) in these understudied regions. Our objective is to map vegetation change in Brazil’s three largest dryland ecoregions – the Cerrado, Caatinga, and Mato Grosso seasonal forests – using MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data from 2001 to 2009 at the scale of the municipality.

The unsustainable use of the soil of the deforested area at the Amazonian border is one of the greatest threats to the rainforest. Among the causes of land degradation in the humid tropics are phosphorus depletion (P), the decrease of soil organic matter (SOM) and the loss of basic cations.

Economic globalization manifests in landscapes through regional integration initiatives involving trans-boundary infrastructure. While the relationships of roads, accessibility and land cover are well-understood, they have rarely been considered across borders in national frontier regions. We therefore pursue an analysis of infrastructure connectivity and land cover change in the tri-national frontier of the southwestern Amazon where Bolivia, Brazil and Peru meet, and where the Inter-Oceanic Highway has recently been paved.

Agricultural land degradation is a global problem that severely hampers the production of food needed to sustain the growing world population. Mapping of soil degradation by remote sensing is instrumental for understanding the spatial extent and rate of this problem. Methods aimed at detecting soil loss, soil drying, and soil-quality deterioration have been demonstrated in numerous studies utilizing passive and active remote sensors.

Over the last three decades, many soil and water conservation projects have been implemented in various parts of eastern and southern Africa to control land degradation, and improve land productivity, especially under ‘catchment approach’ initiatives of the 1980s. In Ethiopia, many of these soil conservation projects were implemented following the severe drought of 1974.

Human activities, such as land use change, cause severe land degradation in many ecosystems around the globe with potential impacts on soil processes. Restoration practices aim at reverting such impacts and reconstituting the biotic composition and functioning of an ecosystem to its initial condition. The aim of this study was to monitor soil microbial properties in degraded lands in Northeast Brazil and to compare those with land under restoration.