1. Land-use studies are challenging because of the difficulty of finding catchments that can be used as replicates and because land-use effects may be obscured by sources of variance acting over spatial scales smaller than the catchment. To determine the extent to which land-use effects on stream ecosystems are scale dependent, we designed a wholecatchment study of six matched pairs (pasture ve...

The construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam began in 2011, resulting in rapidly increased population from less than 80,000 persons before 2010 to more than 150,000 persons in 2012 in Altamira, Pará State, Brazil. This rapid urbanization has produced many problems in urban planning and management, as well as challenging environmental conditions, requiring monitoring of urban land-cover ...

Many studies have identified drivers of deforestation throughout the tropics and, in most cases, have recognised differences in the level of threat. However, only a few have also looked at the temporal and spatial dynamics by which those drivers act, which is critical for assessing the conservation of biodiversity as well as for landscape planning. In this study, we analyse land cover change be...

Despite the apparent abundance of land, agricultural land with a dependable growing period represents a fraction of the total land area in Ethiopia. Moreover, land degradation is extensive and severe, particularly in the highlands above 1500 meters above sea level, which account for about 40 percent of the total land area but home for 90 percent of the total population and 70 percent of livesto...

We present a global agricultural greenhouse gas model that assesses emissions from land-use change. In addition to evaluating shifts in and out of crop production, we develop a pasture model to assess extensification and intensification of global livestock production based on herd size and stocking rate. We apply the model to a scenario that introduces a tax on methane emissions from cattle in ...

the ecological footprint as an indicator estimates the effect of population and industrial products process on ecosystem by evaluating and calculating the used energy and materials in a city, region or country. dehgolan county is located in kurdistan province between hamadan and sanandaj cities. dehgolan is one of the important and effective counties of kurdistan in agriculture. however, with t...

A spatial simulation model was developed to predict temporal changes in land use patterns in a Piedmont county in Georgia. Five land use categories were included: urban, crop, abandoned cropland, pasture, and forest. Land use data were obtained from historical aerial photography and digitized into a matrix based on a 1 ha grid cell format. Transitions of cells from one state to another were dep...

Land-use change is considered likely to be one of main drivers of biodiversity changes in grassland ecosystems. To gain insight into the impact of land use on the underlying soil bacterial communities, we aimed at determining the effects of agricultural management, along with seasonal variations, on soil bacterial community in a Mediterranean ecosystem where different land-use and plant cover t...

The conservation efficiency of Protected Areas (PA) is influenced by the health and characteristics of the surrounding landscape matrix. Fragmentation of adjacent lands interrupts ecological flows within PAs and will decrease the ability of species to shift their distribution as climate changes. For five periods across the 21(st) century, we assessed changes to the extent of primary land, secon...