In an effort to minimize environmental degradation caused by the intensive use of agrochemicals, European Union adopted regulations relevant to afforestation and set aside of agricultural land. The multifunctional role of agriculture enhanced through these regulations and provided adequate motives for a change in the conventional land uses. Cultivators/investors that are interested in afforeste...

Identifying patterns and drivers of regional land use changes is crucial for supporting land management and planning. Doing so for mountain ecosystems in East Asia, such as the So-yang River Basin in South Korea, has until now been a challenge because of extreme social and ecological complexities. Applying the techniques of geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical modeling via multi...

Land-cover and land-use changes are an important part of global change but determine as well livelihoods at local and regional level. The knowledge of change trajectories and possible future conditions is important for a sustainable development strategy. Further on, reliable scenarios with spatial explicit simulations are needed as planning tools for decision makers. This paper describes an exa...

BACKGROUND Physical inactivity and associated co-morbidities such as obesity and cardiovascular disease are estimated to have large societal costs. There is increasing interest in examining the role of the built environment in shaping patterns of physical activity. However, few studies have: (1) simultaneously examined physical activity for leisure and utility; (2) selected study areas with a r...

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...

Two contrasting theories purport to explain the effects of neighborhood non-residential use on residential property values. In traditional zoning theory, separating land from commercial land use is considered to protect residential environments from negative externalities such as noise, litter, and congestion. By contrast, contemporary planning principles including Smart Growth emphasize positi...

Most of currently reported models for predicting PM(2.5) concentrations from satellite retrievals of aerosol optical depth are global methods without considering local variations, which might introduce significant biases into prediction results. In this paper, a geographically weighted regression model was developed to examine the relationship among PM(2.5), aerosol optical depth, meteorologica...