Increased development results in the loss of forest, farm, range, and other open space lands that contribute to the quality of life of U.S. residents. I describe an economic rationale for growing public support for preserving local open space, based the growing scarcity of open space lands. I test the rationale empirically by correlating the prevalence of open space referenda in U.S. counties t...

Oregon's land-use planning program is often cited as an exemplary approach to forest and farmland conservation, but analyses of its effectiveness are limited. This article examines Oregon's land-use planning program using detailed spatial data describing building densities in western Oregon. An empirical model describes changes in building densities on forest and agricultural lands from 1974 to...

Peat and muck soils have unique biological, physical, and chemical properties, and on them the common drainage and management practices that are used on mineral soils are not suitable. Biologically the organic soils support hosts of micro-organisms, mostly bacteria, which are largely responsible for the formation and alteration of the peat. The action of the anaerobic micro-organisms builds up ...

A sink for atmospheric carbon (i.e., CO2) in soils may derive from the application of conservation tillage and the regrowth of native vegetation on abandoned agricultural land. Accumulations of soil organic matter on these lands could offset emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion, in the context of the Kyoto protocol. The rate of accumulation of soil organic matter is often higher on fert...

The International Arid Lands Consortium (IALC) was established in 1990 to promote research, education, and training activities related to the development, management, and reclamation of arid and semiarid lands in the Southwestern United States, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the world. The Consortium supports the ecological sustainability and environmentally sound stewardship of these lands ...

The challenges of managing natural resources of protected areas not only come from the inside of the protected boundaries, but also from the surrounding territories because most of protected lands are open systems that face threats from adjacent areas. The lands of such open systems alter water quality and flow regimes, increase the likelihood of invasive plant and animal range expansions, redu...

Quantifying landscape pattern and its change are essential for the monitoring and assessment of environmental consequences of urban area. This paper aims to analyze spatiotemporal patterns of urban landscape changes in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal by combining remote sensing, GIS and landscape metrics. Multi-temporal satellite images from high resolution (CORONA, SPIN and IKONOS) to moderate resolut...

Afforestation of agricultural lands has been one of the major land use changes in China in recent decades. To better understand the effect of such land use change on soil quality, we investigated selected soil physical, chemical and microbial properties (0-15 cm depth) in marginal agricultural land and a chronosequence of poplar (Populus euramericana cv. 'N3016') plantations (5-, 10-, 15- and 2...

Concern for the potential global change consequences of increasing atmospheric CO has prompted interest in the 2 development of mechanisms to reduce or stabilize atmospheric CO . During the next several decades, a program 2 focused on terrestrial sequestration processes could make a significant contribution to abating CO increases. The 2 reclamation of degraded lands, such as mine-spoil sites, ...