This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global ...

Accurate land cover maps based on remote sensing observations are required for a.o. the evaluation of vegetation change models. In this study, where we investigate the intensification and extensification of land use in an area in southern France, purely spectrally based classification accuracy proved not to be sufficient. Therefore, we present a method to classify Mediterranean vegetation commu...

An interactive and participative approach to involve and mobilise rural communities in water quality control programmes was investigated. Agro-rural watersheds are experiencing serious environmental degradation mainly because of inappropriate land use practices due to various competing and opposing priorities in the community. The communities tend to concentrate on availability of land and wate...

This paper concerns the outer urban area of the town of Granada in the Nasrid period (13the15th centuries). Most agricultural land was irrigated because of the characteristic drought of the Mediterranean climate, and also because of the needs of certain crops which had been brought by the Arabs from monsoon climates. Water distribution followed patterns that were not only hydrographical and top...

The biodiversity of the Southern Balkans, part of the Mediterranean global biodiversity hot-spot, is threatened by land use intensification and abandonment, the latter causing forest encroachment of formerly open habitats. We investigated the impact of forest encroachment on butterfly species richness, community species composition and the representation of life history traits by repeated seaso...

The growing concern about land resource management and the associated decline in land qualities have led to generation of considerable amounts of disciplinary knowledge, collection and management of large disciplinary data-sets from the earth resource processes. This is specially enhanced by the advances in geoinformtaion technology, which has created very efficient possibility of collecting, a...