2017 December - 26 articles
Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) is the most important transformation of the Earth system that occurred in the preindustrial Holocene, with implications for carbon, water and sediment cycles, biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services...
This study aims at demonstrating and critically assessing high-level landscape stakeholders’ perceptions and understandings of landscape-related issues, threats and problems, in the Eastern Mediterranean, through a purposive comparative research surv...
In dryland Africa, access to land and water resources are central to pastoral livelihood activities. Policy intervention in these regions represents the outcome of concerted post-independence processes in which countries have committed to land tenure...
In the Mongolian Plateau, the desert steppe, mountains, and dry lake bed surfaces may affect the process of dust storm emissions. Among these three surface types, dry lake beds are considered to contribute a substantial amount of global dust emission...
Indigenous territories are facing increasing pressures from numerous legal and illegal activities that are pushing commodity frontiers within their limits, frequently causing severe environmental degradation and threatening indigenous territorial rig...
The increase of summer temperatures and a prolonged growing season increase the potential for agricultural land use for subarctic agriculture. Nevertheless, land use at borderline ecotones is influenced by more factors than temperature and the length...
The objective of this study was to examine whether the coupling of a land-use change (LUC) model with a carbon-stock accounting approach and participatory procedures can be beneficial in a data-limited environment to derive implications for environme...
The growing demand for wood to meet EU renewable energy targets has increasingly come under scrutiny for potentially increasing EU import dependence and inducing land use change abroad, with associated impacts on the climate and biodiversity. This ar...
Asian dust events are massive meteorological phenomena during which dust particles from Chinese and Mongolian deserts are blown into the atmosphere and carried by westerly winds across Northeast Asia. Recently, there has been steady increase in both...
This study develops a methodology to identify hot spots of critical forage supply in nomadic pastoralist areas, using the Afar Region, Ethiopia, as a special case. It addresses two main problems. First, it makes a spatially explicit assessment of fod...
This paper presents a conceptual model of land as a coupled human–environment system. Land use and land cover are incorporated as elements of the human and environment system respectively. Drivers and associated processes that influence land use, lan...
Resettlement resulting from dam construction has raised several concerns due to the negative aftermath impacts. In Ghana, the construction of three hydroelectric dams resulted in large-scale resettlements. Given the little experience that Ghana has i...
Participatory mapping of local land use as the basis for planning and decision-making has become widespread around the globe. However, still relatively little is known about the conceptual underpinnings of geographic information produced through part...
This paper analyzes whether national laws acknowledge indigenous peoples and other rural communities in 100 countries as owners of waters that arise within their lands. Results derive from information collected by LandMark to score the legal status o...
In recent years, the competition of uses for scarce and highly valuable natural resources, and the frequency and severity of natural and technological disasters have increased, and this trend is likely to worsen in the years to come. In the Mediterra...
Restoration of degraded landscapes through the implementation of soil and water conservation practices is considered a viable option to increase agricultural production by enhancing ecosystems. However, in the humid Ethiopian highlands, little inform...
By using the difference-in-difference method and introducing control variables, this study investigates the effect of the household registration system (hukou) on farmers’ willingness to transfer rural housing land based on survey data of farmers in...
Currently, the UK has a high self-sufficiency rate in barley production. This paper assessed the effects of projected climate and land use changes on feed barley production and, consequently, on meat supply in the UK from the 2030s to the 2050s. Tota...
Complex couplings and feedback among climate, fire, and herbivory drive short- and long-term patterns of land cover change (LCC) in savanna ecosystems. However, understanding of spatial and temporal LCC patterns in these environments is limited, part...
The aim of the paper is to examine the variability of eastern Mediterranean landscapes using a common mapping framework relying on Landscape Character Mapping (LCM). LCM was adapted to the region’s specificities placing emphasis on the area’s coastal...
A field characterization of the grassland vegetation structure, represented by the coverage of grass canopy (CGC) and the grass height, was carried out during three years (2009–2011) in a priority area for the conservation of grasslands of North Amer...
Remote sensing-based assessments of large river basins such as the Krishna, which supplies water to many states in India, are useful for operationally monitoring agriculture, especially basins that are affected by abiotic stress. Moderate-Resolution...
In several regions in Europe, the horse is becoming a common grazer on semi-natural and cultivated grasslands, though the pasturing benefits for animals and biodiversity alike are not universally appreciated. The composition of ground vegetation on p...
It has been suggested that agricultural land use change and modernization in agricultural production techniques are related to the loss of crop diversity. Two processes contribute to this loss; first is the replacement of landraces by modern varietie...
Indigenous groups are increasingly combining traditional ecological knowledge and Western scientific approaches to inform the management of their lands. We report the outcomes of a collaborative research project focused on key ecological questions as...
The global challenges of food security and biodiversity are rarely addressed together, though recently there has been an increasing awareness that the two issues are closely related. The majority of land available for agriculture is already used for...
