Land use/land cover (LULC) has a profound impact on economy, society and environment, especially in rapid developing areas. Rapid and prompt monitoring and predicting of LULC's change are crucial and significant. Currently, integration of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) methods is one of the most important methods for detecting LULC's change, which includes image p...

Remotely sensed data is the most important data source for environmental change study over the past 40 years. Since large collections of remote sensing imagery have been acquired in a time frame of successive years, it is now possible to study long-term spatio-temporal pattern of environmental change and impacts of human activities. This study seeks an efficient and practical methodology for la...

In human-modified environments, ecological traps may result from a preference for low-quality habitat where survival or reproductive success is lower than in high-quality habitat. It has often been shown that low reproductive success for birds in preferred habitat types was due to higher nest predator abundance. However, between-habitat differences in nest predation may only weakly correlate wi...

Economic pressures from increased commodity prices and the growing demand for land for biomass plantations led to the abolition of compulsory set-aside fields in the European Union in 2008, affecting ca. 10% of total agricultural area. This area is now managed more intensively, and this is expected to adversely affect farmland biodiversity. Unfortunately, no mitigation of set-aside loss was int...

We examined the effects of land cover type on survivorship and productivity of Anopheles gambiae in Kakamega in the western Kenyan highlands (elevation = 1,420-1,580 meters above sea level). Under natural conditions, An. gambiae sensu lato adults emerged only from farmland habitats, with an estimated productivity of 1.82 mosquitoes/meter(2)/week, but not from forest and swamp habitats. To deter...

Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversit...

Food Security and Food Sovereignty are two of the most important issues facing Food Policy. Maintaining productive farmland and sustainable farms as well as providing adequate volumes of foodstuffs have led to measures to protect farmland and farm activities in many countries. These include land use planning with agricultural zones and in some jurisdictions legislation to ‘protect’ agriculture ...

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...

The aim of this paper is to define and quantify environmental indicators for farmland habitat in Italy. Based on OECD works and recent developments by the Joint Working Party in the area of agrienvironmental indicators, we classify agricultural habitat in three main categories: intensive, semi-natural and uncultivated (natural or man-made) habitats located within, at the border and adjacent of ...