Hong Kong has been using the leasehold system of land management rather than freehold since its colonial era. This system controlled and presently still controls uses of leased land through leasehold conditions. Many leases granted decades ago thus require formal modifications to lease conditions to formalize proposed changes in land use, or to realize the actual present economic value of the l...

Many studies have reported the thermal effects of urban expansion from non-built-up land; however, how changes in building height in built-up land influence the regional thermal environment is still uncertain. Thus, taking the transitional region between the Chinese megacities of Beijing and Tianjin as the study area, this study investigated the impacts of built-up land expansion in 2D and 3D o...

In Poland of the 1990s, urban demand for housing land around city agglomerations increased rapidly. The decreasing profitability of agricultural production also caused farmers to become interested in the sale of agricultural land for nonagricultural purposes, and new land legislation granted them the right to sell their land. Polish counties simultaneously received self-governing status, which ...

Land use change is fundamentally a product of the interaction of physical land characteristics, economic considerations and agricultural and environmental policies. Researchers are increasingly combining physical and socio-economic spatial data to investigate the drivers of land-use change in relation to policy and economic developments. Focusing on Ireland, this study develops a panel data set...

The Pearl River Delta in the People’s Republic of China is experiencing rapid rates of economic growth. Government directives in the late 1970s and early 1980s spurred economic development that has led to widespread land conversion. In this study, we monitor land-use through a nested hierarchy of land-cover. Change vectors of Tasseled Cap brightness, greenness and wetness of Landsat Thematic Ma...

Smail, Robert A.; Lewis, David J. 2009. Forest-land conversion, ecosystem services, and economic issues for policy: a review. PNW-GTR-797. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 40 p. The continued conversion and development of forest land pose a serious threat to the ecosystem services derived from forested landscapes. We argue that de...

The expansion of agriculture is posited as one of the main dynamics of land cover change globally, and the robust modeling of these processes is important for policy as well as academic concerns. Madagascar’s farmers stand accused as the “proximate agents” of land conversion in one of the world’s “hottest” biodiversity hotspots, and numerous studies have been conducted to describe and model the...

By manifesting the response of land to human activity and impacts, degradation of forestland indicates the locations where society is in conflict with sustaining the forest environment. The analysis of land degradation in various land-use/cover patterns of Russia’s vast forest zone (about 1050 million ha, or 63% of the country) clearly demonstrates two human-induced problems, inappropriate tech...