Explaining human settlement patterns in a recreational lake district: Vilas County,Wisconsin, USA

Lakeshore development in Vilas County, northern Wisconsin (USA) is heterogeneous, ranging from lakes that are surrounded by homes and commercial establishments to lakes that have no buildings on their shorelines. Development in this recreational area has increased, and since the 1960s over half of new homes have been built on the lakeshore. We examined building density around lakes in relationship to 11 variables, including in-lake, shoreline, and social characteristics. Buildings in many parts of northern Wisconsin tend to be concentrated around shorelines; in Vilas County 61% of all medium-sized buildings (our proxy for residential development) on private land were ≤100 m of a lake. The probability of development on a lake was largely related to lake surface area, with larger, more accessible lakes showing a higher probability of development. Building density along shorelines varied with travel cost, lake surface area, presence of wetlands, and extent of public land ownership. Building density was greater on larger, more accessible lakes that were surrounded by forest (as opposed to wetlands) and public lands. Gaining a more precise understanding of human settlement patterns can help direct planning and resource protection efforts to lakes most likely to experience future development.     

四川的水资源及其利用

本文叙述了四川水资源的分布特点及其开发利用现状。     

景观环境构成在景观评价中的应用

提出了分析景观环境构成在景观评价中的重要性 ,并以芜湖市朱家桥水泥粉磨站项目为例 ,说明景观环境构成在景观评价中的应用     

南岳水濂洞景区规划设计初探

水濂洞是南岳风景区系中的一个重要组成部分,本文就水濂洞景区的规划、设计和建筑提出了一些看法。指出在设计时,要重点突出:静、险、古、幽、奇五个特点。     

Examining Landscape Dynamics at a Watershed Scale Using Landsat TM Imagery for Detection of Wintering Hooded Crane Decline in Yashiro,Japan

It is usually inappropriate to define rectangular land areas or administrative units as the extent for quantifying landscapes that possess hierarchical structure. As a functional unit established by geophysical relationships, the watershed is one of many natural scales in the hierarchical landscape. We examined the dynamics of the Yashiro watershed of Japan at the landscape level using pattern metrics based on Landsat thematic mapper (TM) imagery from 1985 to 1998. This watershed provides important habitats for the hooded crane (Grus monachus), a vulnerable species. While its world population has remained stable, the number wintering at Yashiro has declined in recent years. Changes in landscape metrics reveal that the spatial pattern within the watershed underwent homogenization due to depopulation of local people and shifts in local energy requirements and forest management policy at Yashiro. Specific changes include: a decrease in bare land area from 6.2% to 1.0% of the landscape, increased forest cover from 69.2% to 76.1%, reduction in patch number from 1194 to 616 and enlarged mean patch size, and a decrease in total edge from 223,740 m to 158,040 m. The rate of change in landscape metrics indicates a rapid change towards homogeneity in the landscape since 1990. The temporal changes in hooded crane populations corresponded to the changes in landscape. An alternative explanation has been proposed that decline of the species is influenced by landscape dynamics affecting both habitat selection and food resources. Conservation at the watershed scale is suggested to be complementary to the current conservation measures of the species.     

利用森林景观优势 发展森林旅游业

森林旅游资源的开发与利用是当今各国森林公园建设所面临的一个重要问题。本文就如何克分利用森林旅游资源,发挥森林景观优势开展多种旅游项目,提出了自己的看法与对策,为发展我国旅游业提供了理论依据。     

Taking the Romance out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze

As in many nation-states, Canadian modernity viewed nature through two seemingly opposed gazes: the extractive and the romantic. In many ways, the Romantic movement was a response to the de-humanizing effects of industrial extraction, a process that summarily stripped the natural world of spirit and meaning. For many working within this representational tradition, however, the search for ontological meaning was a question of developing techniques and technologies that will allow us to “see” the spiritual qualities of nature, to see that it can also be mined, assayed, and sold as a spiritual resource that will provide us with metaphysical comfort in the cold and meaningless universe created by the extractive gaze. In this essay, we examine the work of four contemporary Canadian artists who deploy postmodernist strategies of citation and parody to reveal the hidden connection between Canadian landscape art and extractive processes. In so doing, their work seeks to destroy the comforting and familiar pleasures of the extractive and romantic gazes and force Canadians to develop new ways of thinking about our relationship to nature.     

Contemporary forest loss in Myanmar: Effect of democratic transition and subsequent timber bans on landscape structure and composition

This study addresses the effect of political transition and subsequent timber bans on forest loss in Myanmar, in the context of identified drivers. Cook’s Distance (CD) was applied to remotely sensed time-series forest loss dataset to measure the effect of the events. Forest loss derived fragmentation metrics were linked to drivers at a landscape scale. Results show that at the national level, the political transition in 2011 had maximum effect (CD 0.935) on forest loss while the timber bans decreased forest loss by 612.04 km² and 213.15 km² in 2015 and 2017 (CD 0.146 and 0.035), respectively. The effect of the events varied for different States/Regions. The dominant drivers of change shifted from plantations in 2011 to infrastructure development in 2015. This study demonstrates the effects of policy on forest loss at various scales and can inform decision-makers for forest conservation, planning and development of mitigation measures.     

Modeling the Ecological Consequences of Land-Use Policies in an Urbanizing Region

Insight into future land use and effective ways to control land-use change is crucial to addressing environmental change. A variety of growth-control policies have been adopted by municipal and regional governments within the United States to try to minimize the ecological impact of continued urbanization, but it is often unclear if those policies can meet the stated ecological goals. Land-use-change models provide a way to generate predictions of future change, while exploring the impact of different land-use policies before irreversible transformations occur. In this article, an approach to modeling land-use policies that focuses on their ecological consequences is described. The policy simulation approach was used to predict future land use in the Barnegat Bay and Mullica River watersheds, in southeastern New Jersey, USA. Four commonly used policies were considered: down-zoning, cluster development, wetlands/water buffers, and open space protection. The results of the analysis suggest that none of the policies modeled were able to alter future land-use patterns, raising questions about the effectiveness of commonly adopted land-use policies. However, the policy modeling approach used in this study proved to be a useful way to determine if adoption of a given policy could improve the likelihood of meeting ecological goals.     

Landscape fires as social disasters: An overview of ‘the bushfire problem’

The ‘landscape’, ‘bushfire’ or ‘forest-fire’ problem is exemplified by the destruction of homes and human lives by landscape fires raging out of control. The ‘problem’ involves a series of landscapes (e.g. wildland and suburb), a series of systems (e.g. biophysical system and environmental-effects system), and a series of time phases (e.g. planning phase). It is a multi-stakeholder, multi-variable, multi-scale problem. Land uses, like ‘farmland’, imply a set of specific assets and, therefore, particular perceptions of losses. In all land-use designations, at any one point, fire-proneness may be seen as a function of exposure to ignition sources (embers, burning brands or flame radiation and flame contact) and the ease of ignition. The landscape-fire problem has multiple partial ‘solutions’, not just one overall solution, and these involve social governance, land management (public and private), suppression capacity and personal preparedness. The problem needs to be addressed at multiple temporal and spatial scales in an integrated fashion for the outcome to be of maximal benefit. There will always be a residual risk of severe fire occurrence. Minimisation of residual risk requires effective land management, recurrent funding and the perpetual vigilance of all parties.