Land use change alters the structure and composition of microbial communities. However, the links between environmental factors and microbial functions are not well understood. Here we interrogated the functional structure of soil microbial communities across different land uses. In a multivariate regression tree analysis of soil physicochemical properties and genes detected by functional micro...

The area of Huelva, in the South of Spain, is a well-known case of human pressure on the natural environment. In Huelva, National Parks, like Doñana, and industrial and tourist zones coexist in difficult balance. The Regional Ministry of Andalusia is commissioned to assure the preservation of the natural resources in this part of Spain although its cost can be high in time and money. Remote sen...

Restoration of the degraded ecosystem is a global priority for achieving sustainable development. Although increasing ecosystem service is an important goal of ecological restoration, it is rarely used to inform mine reclamation. This study proposed a reclamation strategy that incorporated land suitability analysis and ecosystem service evaluation for a mining site in Liaoning Province, China. ...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We quantify the effects of net returns to alternative land uses on private landowners’ decisions to allocate l...

The global land system is under intense pressure from human demands for a range of different services. Economic theory suggests that globalised free trade is the most efficient way of handling these demands, allowing maximum productivity and specialisation of supply. However, political responses are often protectionist in nature, designed to ensure continuity of land uses and the regional produ...

Landscape Development Intensity (LDI) values were calculated for selected land uses within the Bayou Meto Watershed (BMW), Arkansas, USA, using existing land use data and annual measures of non-renewable energy use per unit area, as part of an effort to assess the effect of the surrounding land use on the condition of floodplain forested wetlands. Level 2 land use categories from the 1999 Arkan...

The vertical distribution of dominant genera of bacterivorous nematodes to 150-cm depth in an aquic brown soil was compared after 14 years of four contrasting land uses, i.e., cropland-rice (CR), cropland-maize (CM), abandoned cropland (AC), and woodland (WL). The study was conducted at the Shenyang Experimental Station of Ecology, a Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN) site in Northeast C...

Land-use change has a crucial influence on soil respiration, which further affects soil nutrient availability and carbon stock. We monitored soil respiration rates under different land-use types (tea gardens with three production levels, adjacent woodland, and a vegetable field) in Eastern China at weekly intervals over a year using the dynamic closed chamber method. The relationship between so...

The need for models that forecast land use change spans many disciplines and encompasses many approaches. Pattern-based models were the first in which projections of change at specific locations in actual landscapes could be predicted. In contrast, recent economic models have modeled the underlying behavioral process that produces land use change. This paper combines attributes from each approa...

human activities induced changes in land cover/use have extensive impacts on the landscape. in recent years, these changes had an increasingly growth due to irrational use of the natural resources in iran. hence, considering the negative effects of the inappropriate use of land and land-use change, understanding of the landscape changes over time is necessary to planning and implementation of s...