Sustainable management of coastal mangrove systems requires up-to-date data on land use and land cover information. The objective of this study was to use Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) remote sensing information to provide such management data and corresponding analysis. This study showed that the degradation of Ghana’s mangroves was due primarily to ...

Ramu Sugar Plantation was established in 1979. This paper presents an overview of changes in soil chemical and physical properties that have resulted from continuous sugarcane cultivation since that time. Between 1979 and 1996, the soil pH decreased from about 6.5 to 5.8 and this acidification was accompanied by a decrease in cation exchange capacity and exchangeable cations. Organic carbon lev...

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To secure adequate food supply is the major challenge for humanity in the 21st century. Growing world population andits urbanization put pressure on this basic need, which is further threatened by the constant loss of fertile land. Theassessment of sustainability of food supply under increasing pressure on land resources has been selected as one of themost important priority topics ...

Within the last few years, Tanzania has witnessed mushrooming growth of “wildlife management areas” (WMAs). These are broadly meant to halt (or reduce) loss of wildlife populations, and ensure that local people benefit from their conservation. However, human pressure is rapidly increasing and causing management problems in the WMAs. Some human land-use activities also limit wildlife dispersal, ...

Cities worldwide have been trying to achieve a sustainable urban form to handle their rapid urban growth. Many sustainable urban forms have been studied and two of them, the compact city and the eco city, were chosen in this study as urban form foundations. Based on these forms, four sustainable city criteria (compactness, compatibility, dependency, and suitability) were considered as necessary...

Most of the world's biodiversity will continue to exist outside protected areas and there are also managed lands within many protected areas. In the assessment of millennium targets, there is therefore a need for indicators to measure biodiversity and suitability of habitats for biodiversity both across the whole landscape/seascape and in specific managed habitats. The two predominant land uses...

Increasingly developing world governments are being re-structured to improve governance and to alleviate poverty, and this also applies to government departments associated with the registration and cadastral systems. The link between cadastral reform, good governance and poverty alleviation will be explored by reviewing some of the recent thinking in this area, and by drawing on experience wit...

Let me congratulate Thom Jayne and his co-authors on a comprehensive overview of emerging land issues in Africa. Resolution of these issues is clearly central to the successful transformation of the agricultural sector in Africa in terms of growth, poverty reduction, and sustainable management of natural resources. Even more fundamentally, it is critical to avoiding the growing number of confli...

There has been worldwide concern for sustainable development especially after the 1992’s Rio’s UN Conference on Environment and Development. Rapid encroachment of urban development on valuable agricultural land will have great in ̄ uence on whether sustainable development can be achieved. A sustainable land development model is developed using GIS in an attempt to control urban sprawl under rapi...