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A model of land use implemented in the Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam is discussed. The model shows that there is a chance of land use altering with the rural policies.

Recognition of the importance of forests for local livelihoods, biodiversity and the climate system has spurred a growing interest in understanding the factors that drive forest-cover change. Forest transitions, the change from net deforestation to net reforestation, may follow different pathways depending on a complex interplay of driving forces. However, most studies on forest transitions focus on the national level rather than the local level. Here, case studies from 10 villages in Yunnan, China, are used to clarify the complex interactions among various pathways of forest transitions, derive insights on the underlying drivers that shaped the forest transitions, and determine the importance of changes in drivers over time. The results demonstrate that China's recent forest transition was caused by a range of interrelated pathways that were mediated by local circumstances. The degradation of forest ecosystem services caused by rampant deforestation and forest degradation created a scarcity of forest products and triggered state-initiated afforestation efforts, particularly in the 1990s, which continue to be important. More recently, economic development concomitant with smallholder intensification spurred reforestation, while the importance of state forest policy declined. The complexity of local land-use changes demonstrates the difficulty of identifying distinct transition pathways and calls for a more diverse approach that recognizes the interdependence of local processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abandoned underground mines (AUM) have caused dramatic environmental effects that are closely linked to regional sustainability. This paper explores the potential hydrological impact of AUM in the Monday Creek Watershed, a typically mined area in Appalachian region, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT 2005) model and Sequential Uncertainty Fitting (SUFI-2), calibrated at both the global and local scales. The locally calibrated model better incorporates those key parameters relevant to AUM for specific sub-basins and hydrologic response units. Data from the years 2003-2004 were used for calibration and 2005-2006 for validation. The results were quite satisfactory; both the coefficient of determination ( R2) and the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency statistic were over 0.80. The potential influences of AUM were assessed by modelling an alternative scenario assuming no AUM for the period 2003-2009. Results show that the hydrological process of lateral subsurface flow plays a dominant role in linking AUM to overall watershed hydrology. The potential hydrological impact of AUM is an increased annual lateral flow of 82.1%, and a decrease in annual surface flow by 15%, leading to an increase of 16.9% in annual water yield for the Monday Creek Watershed. The seasonal fluctuation of water yield has a similar trend to lateral flow, decreasing from March to August and increasing from August to January. Higher volume, higher flow peaks and higher recession constants characterized the hydrograph of daily streamflow from AUM. The results indicate that more emphasis should be put on lateral flow for further study of acid mine drainage and flooding control in those watersheds with AUM. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regionalization is offered as a solution to the challenges that both communities and farmers face in our globalized food system. However, our research reveals that farmers’ willingness and ability to adapt to a regionalized food system are tempered by social meanings of and social relationships with agriculture—or what farmers classify as ‘farming’. These classifications are developed and reinforced over time and are reflective of the regional commodity history, infrastructure and policy. In essence, the ‘region’ simultaneously provides a space of opportunity and constrains the possibilities for adaptation. Therefore, without having an understanding of the regional commodity history and embedded classifications of farming, it is difficult for communities to assist with transforming a food system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Planners and policy makers are increasingly aware that local amenities can play an important role in community and regional development and greenways represent one such amenity that can be locally developed. As planning initiatives compete for scarce resources it becomes vital that decision makers have ex ante information about the impact of policy options. This paper provides empirical estimates of changes in land value that should be expected if a planned greenway, the Catawba Regional Trail, is developed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Passing through economically modest neighborhoods, the trail holds potential to increase equity in the distributions of open space though the aggregate impact on priority values is limited by neighborhood characteristics. Using a hedonic land value model. we estimate the real estate premium associated with the trail and find that most of the impact to land values will be captured within 1000 ft of the planned greenway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postsocialist transitions in Eastern Europe have focused on the establishment of private property rights, often to the exclusion of other aspects of rural land use systems. After the demise of socialism in 1991, Albania privatized virtually all agricultural land by redistributing formerly collective land on an equal per capita basis. This article examines the dramatic effects of the transition in general and the land reform in particular on Albania’s rural landscapes. A village-level survey was conducted to analyze household resources and constraints. The survey was integrated with data derived from satellite image interpretation and geographic information systems to develop statistical models of two key land-cover changes of interest: the abandonment of cropland and forest-cover loss. Statistical corrections were implemented to control for cross-scale interactions and geocomputation was employed to assess the goodness of fit of the models and the robustness of the results. Findings indicate that most cropland abandonment at the onset of the transition period was concentrated in marginal, less densely populated areas. More recently, abandonment was increasingly shaped by economic returns from cultivation and the growing competition with nonfarm livelihood strategies. Land fragmentation, an outcome of Albania’s land reform, was associated with greater abandonment in the later stages of transition. Patterns of forest clearing were subsistence driven and found around populated areas in the period immediately following the collapse of socialism, whereas more commercial clearing patterns emerged over time. Because of the range of social and environmental impacts of large-scale policy shifts, studies of postsocialist landscapes necessitate a multiscale spatial framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]