Planning and construction are well-known practical topics; however, eco-city developments and their sustainable effects on the city are less known. Xi’an is a typical city that has a target to become an eco-city. This city is selected in this case study with the aims of (1) framing eco-practices to enhance the understanding of an eco-city development and (2) evaluating the effect of eco-practic...

China has recently undertaken a very ambitious biofuel production program. However due to a lack of arable land domestically, this program has necessitated the leasing of arable land elsewhere (e.g., in Africa). This thesis first conducts a policy analysis of China’s biofuel policy using a historical institutionalism ends-and-means framework. The analysis reveals the ways in which China achieve...

This study sets out to verify the key predictors of the dynamics of the arable production per capita index, the arable production and permanent crop land and forest area at a national scale in Cameroon. To achieve this objective, data for twelve time series data variables spanning the period 1961-2000 were collected from Oxford University, the United Nations Development program, the World Bank,...

To analyze the changes in the Upper Danube Floodplain, we used aerial photos to quantify the change of landscape pattern from 1963 to 2010. We focused on typical floodplain habitats, i.e., riparian forest and floodplain grassland. We used landscape metrics and transformation matrix to explore changes in land cover structure and composition. The active floodplain experienced increasing fragmenta...

Introduction Unprecedented population growth accompanied equally unprecedented land use and land cover changes in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, affecting the food security of thousands of agriculturally based communities. The more than doubling of the population of Latin America was accompanied by rural migration to urban areas and extensification, or expansion,...

Over the past two decades, the Leizhou Peninsula has suffered from many geological hazards and great property losses caused by land subsidence. However, the absence of a deformation map of the whole peninsula has impeded the government in making the necessary decisions concerning hazard prevention and mitigation. This study aims to provide the evolution of land deformation (subsidence and uplif...

Arable land use is generally assumed to be the largest contributor to agricultural diffuse pollution. This study adds to the growing evidence that conventional temperate intensively managed lowland grasslands contribute significantly to soil erosion and diffuse pollution rates. This is the first grassland study to monitor hydrological characteristics and multiple pollutant fluxes (suspended sed...

This study examines the determinants of farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) and their payment levels for ecological compensation of the Poyang Lake Wetland in China. We developed a farmer household survey and gathered 292 effective responses. The contingent valuation method (CVM) and Heckman’s two-step model were employed for the empirical study. Results show that 46.58% of farmers are willing to...

Background: Obscured by the more prevalent discussion of intensification and expansion of agricultural land, the impacts of the abandonment of many grasslands and croplands of the world in recent decades have received limited attention in the literature. Land abandonment is a common phenomenon in the Mediterranean Basin, a global biodiversity hotspot, but little is known about the impacts of th...

Agriculture, the main sector of the Ethiopian economy, accounts for 85% of total employment and is the backbone and mainstay of the economy (Pausewang et al., 1990). However, agricultural productivity is decreasing because of land degradation, particularly due to soil erosion. Hurni (1988) estimated that the extent of erosion from arable land in the highlands of Ethiopia averaged 42 tons/ha/yr....