Land use issues in biomass energy planning

Land availability is a key consideration for evaluating the potential of biomass energy. This depends not only on how much land is physically suitable for growing the biomass crop, but also on the environmental implications of an energy farm and the extent to which land can be freed from competing uses. Energy planning should include inventories to realistically assess the amount of land potentially available for biomass production and the trade-offs involved in using such land for biomass farms.     

Concerns and future preparedness plans of a vulnerable population in New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy

Knowing how people prepare for disasters is essential to developing resiliency strategies. This study examined recalled concerns, evacuation experiences, and the future preparedness plans of a vulnerable population in New Jersey, United States, following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Understanding the responses of minority communities is key to protecting them during forthcoming disasters. Overall, 35 per cent of respondents were not going to prepare for an event. Intended future preparedness actions were unrelated to respondents' ratings of personal impact. More Blacks and Hispanics planned on preparing than Whites (68 versus 55 per cent), and more Hispanics planned on evacuating than did others who were interviewed. A higher percentage of respondents who had trouble getting to health centres were going to prepare than others. Respondents' concerns were connected to safety and survival, protecting family and friends, and having enough food and medicine, whereas future actions included evacuating earlier and buying sufficient supplies to shelter in place.     

Spatial interactions in habitat conservation: Evidence from prairie pothole easements

We examine the role of spatial interactions in conservation easements placed on prairie pothole habitat in western Canada. One of the goals of the conservation easement program we study is to protect contiguous habitat. We identify endogenous spatial interactions among conservation easements and government protected land, independent of spatially correlated landscape features and local economic shocks that influence easement enrollment. We present evidence that easements increase the likelihood of subsequent easements on neighboring land. Government-protected land appears to have little effect on the location of conservation easements. These results imply that conservation agencies have leveraged past conservation investment to enroll more contiguous habitat in permanent easements through a combination of targeting and positive social interactions among neighboring landowners.     

A regression tree-based method for integrating land-cover and land-use data collected at multiple scales

As data sets of multiple types and scales proliferate, it will be increasingly important to be able to flexibly combine them in ways that retain relevant information. A case in point is Amazonia, a large, data-poor region where most whole-basin data sets are limited to understanding land cover interpreted through a variety of remote sensing techniques and sensors. A growing body of work, however, indicates that the future state of much of Amazonia depends on the land use to which converted areas are put, but land use in the tropics is difficult to assess from remotely sensed data alone. An earlier paper developed new snapshots of agricultural land use in this region using a statistical fusion of satellite data and agricultural census data, an underutilized ancillary data source available across Amazonia. The creation of these land-use maps, which have the spatial detail of a satellite image and the attribute information of an agricultural census, required the development of a new statistical technique for merging data sets at different scales and of fundamentally different data types. Here we describe and assess this nonlinear technique, which reinterprets existing land cover classifications by determining what categories are most highly related to the polygon land-use data across the study area. Although developed for this region, the technique appears to hold broad promise for the systematic fusion of multiple data sets that are closely related but of different origins. The figures in the printed version of this article appear in black and white. Color figures are available from the author upon request.     

Differentiated impacts of environmental policies on the Colombian Frontier: coercive conservation and containment of illicit activities in the Pacific and the Ariari region

ABSTRACT

This article, through the use of political ecology perspectives on coercive conservation, aims to explain how in two separate Colombian Natural Parks and buffer zones, environmental policies designed to (re)take control of the frontier, have produced a similar territorial differentiation in the contention of illicit activities. Los Farallones in the Colombian Pacific and La Macarena/Puerto Rico in the Ariari region have experienced different stages of the armed conflict and are at the center of this analysis. I argue that in the contexts of both conflict escalation (1998–2007) and conflict de-escalation (2008–2016), the State in its attempt to control the frontier has not only had military intervention in areas of conservation but has also reinforced environmental programs that attack illegal mining and coca, producing both a territorially differentiated containment of illicit activities and an uneven progression of the illicit frontier.     

Studying crop sequences with CarrotAge,a HMM-based data mining software

We have developed a knowledge discovery system based on high-order hidden Markov models for analyzing spatio-temporal data bases. This system, named CarrotAge , takes as input an array of discrete data – the rows represent the spatial sites and the columns the time slots – and builds a partition together with its a posteriori probability. CarrotAge has been developed for studying the cropping patterns of a territory. It uses therefore an agricultural drench database, named Ter-Uti , which records every year the land-use category of a set of sites regularly spaced. The results of CarrotAge are interpreted by agronomists and used in research works linking agricultural land use and water management. Moreover, CarrotAge can be used to find out and study crop sequences in large territories, that is a main question for agricultural and environmental research, as discussed in this paper.     

广东土地退化及治理对策

本文概述土地退化的原因和状况。通过对广东山区土壤和东江流域低产耕地的大批土壤剖面分析数据的统计和推算,结果表明,广东的林地退化面积约占全省陆地面积的35％;旱地土地退化面积占全省旱地总面积的95％;水田土地退化面积约占全省水田总面积的25％。根据广东的省情,提出土地退化治理的对策:提高认识,增加投入,组织力量,开展调查摸底;制订整体治理规划,分步实施;明确治理的中心任务,推进面上治理利用,加强研究工作。     

Portuguese coastal zones and the new coastal management plans

Coastal zones in Portugal, as interface areas between land and sea, have problems related to the growing human pressure in terms of changes in land use associated with urban and industrial occupation, new accessibility (ports, motorways) and traffic flows, intensification of recreational use (beaches, water sports) and excessive fishing. Impacts include deterioration of water quality and sediments; alteration and degradation of natural habitats; new hydrodynamic situations; major landscape changes: and rapid changes in habits and way of life of the local populations and increased exposure of populations and assets to natural and induced risks (storms, accidents, spills, explosions). Plans for the Management of the Coastal Zone (POOC) have been developed and seven of them have been approved, while two similar plans are at a final stage of preparation. Together they cover the entire coast of Portugal. Their implementation and assessment could be a first step towards an integrated management of the Portuguese coastal zones. River Basin Management Plans (PBH) have been concluded and recently approved for the whole country. However, these plans do not consider estuarine systems and some other issues related to coastal systems. The National Water Plan (PNA) is under public presentation and discussion. Several ‘key messages’ are presented in this paper as a contribution for assessment of the proposals of this plan on issues related with coastal waters.     

Quantifying inconsistencies in old cadastral maps and their impact on land-use reconstructions

ABSTRACT

Old cadastral maps represent a historical reference dataset for long-term land-use reconstructions. This study presents identification of inconsistencies in the nineteenth century Franziscean cadastre, one of the largest sets of old cadastral maps worldwide, by comparing three versions of the maps and written documents created in the same period. We identified all parcels and their land-use in the four sub-sources in six study areas. The overall share of inconsistencies among 5 771 identified parcels is 7.4%, with the biggest share of inconsistency in agroforestry and forestry classes. The most frequent inconsistencies are of ‘Not differentiable land use’ (n = 212) and ‘Different land-use’ categories across the sub-sources (n = 113). We conclude that the frequency of uncertainties in old cadastral maps may limit the validity of historical land-use reconstructions, affecting the eventual restoration and management efforts based on such data. We provide a summary for the use of Franziscean cadastre.     

Assessing Land-Use Impacts on Natural Resources

/ Much information is available on changes that occur in natural resources from both spatially-explicit data on environmental conditions and models of the interactions of these conditions and resources with human activities. The strategy for assessing land-use impacts on natural resources developed in this paper provides a framework for using relevant data and models to address questions of how management practices can promote both use and protection of resources. This assessment strategy integrates spatially explicit environmental data using geographic information systems (GIS) with computer models that simulate changes in land cover in response to land-use impacts. The computer models also simulate susceptibility of species to changes in habitat suitability and landscape patterns. The approach is applied to management of limestone barrens on the Oak Ridge Reservation in East Tennessee. Potential limestone barrens habitats are identified by overlaying appropriate soils, geology, slope, and land-use/land-cover conditions. Their validity is tested against known sites containing rare species that occur in these habitats. The location of habitats at risk in the aftermath of human activities is determined by using an available area model that identifies the size and proximity of sites that particular types of species can no longer use as habitat. The resulting risk map can be used in land management planning. The approach uses readily available in situ and remotely sensed data and is applicable to a wide range of locations and land-use scenarios. This approach can be refined based on needs identified by land managers and on the sensitivity of the results to the resolution of available resource information.KEY WORDS: Land management; Assessment; Habitat characterization; Limestone barrens; Ecological modeling; Geographic information systems