Farmland fragmentation is considered to be a defining feature of Northern Ireland’s (NI) agricultural landscape, influencing efficiency, productivity, and the spread livestock diseases. Despite this, full extent farmland in cattle farms NI not well understood, little known how either influences, or influenced by, different animal production types. Here, we describe quantify for all NI, using GI...

In this paper I describe some of the ways in which landscape ecology principles have been incorporated into land use planning and change. In Scotland we have tried developing landscape-scale or regional plans for land use change to resolve issues of habitat fragmentation – the ‘big plans’ of the title. We have also developed ‘little plans’ – much smaller proposals based on individual designated...

Recent land reforms in China have sought to address fundamental problems with the Household Production Responsibility System such as land fragmentation. Primarily the reforms have targeted land productivity and grain output. However, the reforms have had a much broader effect on rural development as they have allowed a degree of household specialisation in non-grain activities both on and off t...

Despite the apparent abundance of land, agricultural land with a dependable growing period represents a fraction of the total land area in Ethiopia. Moreover, land degradation is extensive and severe, particularly in the highlands above 1500 meters above sea level, which account for about 40 percent of the total land area but home for 90 percent of the total population and 70 percent of livesto...

This thesis aims to review and contribute to the literature on land reform and economic development. It does so by evaluating the impact of land reforms in India on agricultural modernization in twelve states over the years 1961-1987. The main findings are although there is limited evidence of the successful implementation of land reforms, adoption of tenancy reforms seems to have a significant...

Assessing model performance is a continuous challenge for modelers of land use change. Comparing land use models with two neutral models, including the random constraint match model (RCM) and growing cluster model (GrC) that consider the initial land use patterns using a variety of evaluation metrics, provides a new way to evaluate the accuracy of land use models. However, using only two neutra...

This study intends to identify both general trends and subtle patterns of urban land changes of the past three decades in metropolitan Kansas City area. Landsat images were used to generate time series of land cover data from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. Based on remotely sensed land cover data, landscape metrics were calculated. Both the remotely sensed data and landscape metrics were u...

Neutralization of landmines is dangerous and complicated work. For Humanitarian Demining, the most common neutralization method is demolition using small explosive charges. Although common practice, demolition has several disadvantages. Deminers need non-explosive mine neutralization technologies that are safer, more reliable and less expensive. To meet this need, several innovative non-explosi...

The Brazilian Amazon in the past decades has been suffering severe landscape alteration, mainly due to anthropogenic activities, such as road building and land clearing for agriculture. Using a high-resolution time series of land cover maps (classified as mature forest, non-forest, secondary forest) spanning from 1984 through 2011, and four uncorrelated fragmentation metrics (edge density, clum...