To investigate the effect of arable land protection policies in China, a practical framework that integrates geographic information systems (GIS), soil quality assessment and landscape metrics analysis was employed to track and analyze arable land transformations and landscape changes in response to rampant urbanization within the Ningbo region (China) from 2005 to 2013. The results showed that...

Land degradation is a major danger which restricting different areas of Iran. Systematic description of the environmentfor detection of environmental changes and the human-related causes and responses is essential in land cover changestudy. Use of land cover data allow detection of where certain changes occur, what type of change, as well as how theland is changing. Existing systems for classif...

Bees are a functionally important and economically valuable group, but are threatened by land-use conversion and intensification. Such pressures are not expected to affect all species identically; rather, they are likely to be mediated by the species' ecological traits.Understanding which types of species are most vulnerable under which land uses is an important step towards effective conservat...

We developed further an IPCC-based Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) to monitor soil C stocks and flows for New Zealand. Geo-referenced soil C data were extended from 340 to 1119 sites (0.3 m depth) and used to assign steady-state soil C stocks to various combinations of soil class, climate, and land use. Overall, CMS soil C stock estimates are consistent with detailed, stratified soil C measureme...

Disclaimer: While the subgroup benefited from the active participation of its members, not all members had the opportunity to fully participate in the drafting of this final document. Therefore, these recommendations do not necessarily represent full concurrence by all subgroup members and in general should not be considered as necessarily supported by the organizations they represent. As land ...

This study analyzed land use and land cover changes and their impact on land surface temperature using Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager and Thermal Infrared Sensor imagery of the Yellow River Delta. Six Landsat images comprising two time series were used to calculate the land surface temperature and correlated vegetation indices. The Yellow River Delta area has ex...

We propose a framework with endogenous allocation of land between agricultural production, sustainable forest management, and unsustainable forest exploitation in the form of illegal logging to explore deforestation and agricultural and timber supplies when property rights are insecure. Uncertainty over property rights arises through risk of confiscation on sustainably-managed forest land, and ...

Spatio-temporal land cover changes witnessed within the Nyando River Basin of Kenya were assessed in this study. The land cover changes were mapped by classifying the predominant land cover classes on selected Landsat satellite images. The accuracy of the classifications were assessed using reference datasets developed and processed in a GIS with the help ground based information obtained throu...