Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation. To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road place...

Global increases in both agriculture and biodiversity awareness raise a key question: Should cropland and biodiversity habitat be separated, or integrated in mixed land uses? Ecosystem services by wildlife make this question more complex. For example, birds benefit agriculture by preying on pest insects, but other habitat is needed to maintain the birds. Resulting land use questions include wha...

Reducing emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses is considered an essential ingredient of an effective strategy to mitigate global warming. Required changes in land use and forestry, however, often imply foregoing returns from locally more attractive resource use strategies. We assess and compare the prospects of mitigating climate change through emission reductions from fores...

"Landscape approaches" seek to provide tools and concepts for allocating and managing land to achieve social, economic, and environmental objectives in areas where agriculture, mining, and other productive land uses compete with environmental and biodiversity goals. Here we synthesize the current consensus on landscape approaches. This is based on published literature and a consensus-building p...

A common strategy in mitigating secondary salinity in southern Australia is the planting of trees and other deep-rooted perennial vegetation. Planting needs to target areas where perennials will provide the most benefit by minimising runoff and groundwater recharge. A number of one-dimensional (1D) water balance models have been developed in Australia that predict water balance components (evap...

tajikistan is a hotspot of plant and animal species diversity and endemism andis important for the conservation of biodiversity on a global scale. the country is located ata biological crossroads. species from central and northern europe, central asia, themiddle east, and north africa mingle here with endemics found nowhere else. therichness of tajikistan‘s biodiversity shows up at the genetic,...

This paper discusses the hydrological impacts of land use changes on the Olifants Basin in South Africa using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). A three-phase land use scenario (2000, 2007 and 2013) employing the “fix-changing” method was used to simulate the hydrology of the Olifants Basin. Changes in land uses were related to different hydrological responses through a multi-regression...