Land fragmentation is a significant problem in many parts of the world which hinders rational agricultural development and rural sustainable development. Land consolidation is considered to be the most effective land management approach for solving the problem of land fragmentation. It involves the re-organisation of the land tenure structure through land reallocation (or readjustment) and the ...

Habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity, yet separating their effects is challenging. We use a multi-trophic, trait-based, and spatially explicit general ecosystem model to examine the independent and synergistic effects of these processes on ecosystem structure. We manipulated habitat by removing plant biomass in varying spatial extents, intensities, and configurations...

Urbanisation and associated growth patterns (urban sprawl) are characteristic of spatial temporal land use changes taking place at regional levels. Unplanned urbanization and consequent impacts on natural resources including basic amenities has necessitated the investigation and understanding of mechanisms and dynamics of land use and land-use change on a range of spatial scales and evaluate th...

Peripheral populations often experience more extreme environmental conditions than those in the centre of a species' range. Such extreme conditions include habitat loss, defined as a reduction in the amount of suitable habitat, as well as habitat fragmentation, which involves the breaking apart of habitat independent of habitat loss. The 'threshold hypothesis' predicts that organisms will be mo...

This paper looks at the economics of conversion and fragmentation of forest land. The forestry economics literature has generally focussed on the management of a single stand for timber and non-timber forest benefits with little attention being paid to forest level land use decisions, and in particular forest stand interactions. As noted by Bowes and Krutilla (1989), the focus on a single stand...

Scientists have aimed at exploring land use and land cover change (LUCC) and modeling future landscape pattern in order to improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of these phenomena. This study addresses LUCC in the upper reaches of Minjiang River, China, from 1974 to 2000. Based on remotely sensed images, LUCC and landscape pattern change were assessed using cross-tabulation a...

Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological and environmental balance of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the most populous metropolitan area in Canada, in the past three decades. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between landscape change and population increase patterns as well as to evaluate ecological impacts of urbanization in the GTA.Multi-temporal re...

Land use planning is always officially implemented as an effective tool to control urban development and protect farmland. However, its impact on land use change remains untested in China. Using a case study of Hang-Jia-Hu region, the main objective of this paper was to investigate the influence of different land use spatial control schemes on farmland conversion and urban development. Comparis...