Cities and biodiversity: Spatial efficiency of land use

Land-use, Land-cover Changes and Biodiversity Loss

During Earth's history, species extinction has probably been caused by modifications of the physical environment after impacts such as meteorites or volcanic activity. On the contrary, the actual extinction of species is mainly a result of human activities, namely any form of land use that causes the conversion of vast areas to settlement, agriculture, and forestry, resulting in habitat destruc...

Land Administration, Spatial Systems and Cities – an Australian Perspective

The paper argues that any spatial information strategy for urban, local government or city jurisdiction is intimately linked to and influenced by the state or national land administration and cadastral systems where it is located. It is these state or national systems which usually provide the spatial infrastructure for urban information systems. Therefore to understand current trends in urban ...

Spatial differentiation of compensation payments for biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures

Given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures are subject to spatial variation, considerations of allocational efficiency call for spatially differentiated compensation payments for such measures. However, when deciding whether to implement uniform or spatially differentiated compensation payments, the regulator has to balance the allocational efficiency...

Comparing and modelling land use organization in cities.

The advent of geolocated information and communication technologies opens the possibility of exploring how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban scientists and planners, especially for regions where data are scarce or not available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method a...

Agricultural Land Use and Biodiversity in the Alps