There is a growing debate on whether agricultural land in urban fringe should be maintained or converted to other uses. While ‘pro-ruralists’ believe agricultural land conversion can threaten food security and cause rural-urban migration, ‘pro-urbanists’ find it a necessary change for transition from a primitive agricultural-based community to an advanced industrialbased society which has the c...

The expansion of the cities into the rural-urban fringes is creating direct and indirect impacts with those living there facing new challenges and opportunities in meeting their life needs and accommodating the by-products of urbanization. Although urbanization in these areas provides opportunities for employment, better housing, education, knowledge and technology transfer, and ready markets f...

China has been through a period of remarkable urban sprawl since the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, with the highest urbanization occurring in the coastal zones. Sustainable urban development requires a better understanding of the spatiotemporal characteristics of urbanization. This study systematically explored urban sprawl in Chinese coastal cities with a visual interpretation method f...

Much has been written about the rise of the local food movement in urban and suburban areas. This essay tackles an emerging outgrowth of that movement: the growing desire of urban and suburban dwellers to engage rural areas where food is produced not only to obtain food but also as a means of tourism and cultural activity. This represents a potentially much-needed means of economic development ...

Chinese cities are experiencing rapid urban expansion and being transformed into more dispersed urban form which necessitate the quantification of fine-scale intra-urban characteristics for sustainable urban development. We propose an integrated multi-level and multi-dimensional method to characterize urban sprawl and apply it to Wuhan, a typical metropolitan area in central China from 1996 to ...

Land use planning practices have been economically justified as an efficient means of producing and distributing valuable information relevant to property markets and further reducing the intrinsic uncertainties and transaction costs involved in land development processes. However, although this method of justification, in addition to traditional welfare-economics-based rationales, has been ado...

Accuracy assessment for remote sensing classification is commonly based on using an error matrix, or confusion table, which needs reference, or ‘ground truthing’, data to support. When undertaking change detection using numerous multi-temporal images, it is often difficult to make the accuracy assessment by the ‘traditional’ method, which typically requires simultaneous collection of reference ...

Introduction: Climate change and urbanization have been shown to alter plant phenology. However, a mechanistic understanding of these changes in flowering phenology and associated pollinator communities is lacking. Thus, this study was designed to examine finer scale flowering phenological patterns and driving processes in an arid urban ecosystem. Specifically, we tested the effect of water ava...

Cities in developing countries are facing serious problems as a result of rapid urban population growth. Not the least of these problems is the creation of environmental stresses at the rural-urban fringe of these cities as they increase in area and envelop fertile surrounding agricultural lands. Because of this rapid rate of growth, sustainable urban environmental management (SUEM) policies an...