This paper examines how water shaped people’s interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a ‘turn to matter’, which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment.

The article examines the context of a recently discovered double bath-house complex in Loutres, a site near Mochlos on the north shore of eastern Crete. The excavators explore the broader questions posed by the finding, in connection to both its immediate surroundings and its wider periphery. Its relation to the site’s geography, a ravine on the shore, forms the starting point to address issues regarding its original use as well as its later transformations.

Urban green space (UGS) has been proven to be essential for improving the health of residents. Local governments thus need to provide attractive UGS to enhance residents’ wellbeing. However, cities face spatial and finanical limitations in creating and managing UGS. As a result, greening plans often fail or are postponed indefinitely. To evaluate whether informal urban green space (IGS) can supplement existing UGS, we conducted a questionnaire survey of 567 residents in Ichikawa (Japan), a city currently providing only 3.43 m2 green space per capita.

Maize is an important staple crop in Mexico, and the recent intensification of climate variability, in combination with non-climatic forces, has hindered increases in production, especially for smallholder farmers. This article demonstrates the influence of these drivers on maize production trends in the three states of the Yucatan Peninsula using a mixed methods approach of climatic analysis and semi-structured interviews.

Tiger numbers have collapsed so dramatically that conservationists are adopting a strategy of securing populations in priority conservation landscapes. This includes improving management effectiveness in these sites. The Conservation Assured|Tiger Standards (CA|TS) are designed to help ensure effectiveness and provide a benchmark against which to measure progress.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is cultivated as a major crop in most Asian countries and its production is expected to increase to meet the demands of a growing population. This is expected to increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from paddy rice ecosystems, unless mitigation measures are in place. It is therefore important to assess GHG mitigation potential whilst maintaining yield.

Governments, multilateral organisations, and international conservation NGOs increasingly frame nature conservation in terms that emphasise the importance of technically managing and economically valuing nature, and introducing markets for ecosystem services. New mechanisms, such as REDD+, have been incorporated in national-level policy reforms, and have been piloted and implemented in rural project settings across the Global South.

With the rapid rate of population growth and economic development, cities face enormous challenges that require both optimal and integrated solutions to meet the needs of growth and to protect the environment and sustainable development. These urban dynamics, which change over time, extend not only horizontally and upward, but also downward. Thus, underground space has been utilized increasingly to relieve the urban surface and to ensure the exploitation of underground resources.

Landscapes have long been viewed as complex, synthetic entities reflecting the human imprint upon the land. [...]

With the purpose to study a solution based on Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) to reduce and treat stormwater runoff in urban areas, a bioretention pond (BP) was realized in the Agripolis campus of the University of Padova, Italy. The BP collected overflow water volumes of the rainwater drainage system of a 2270 m2 drainage area consisting almost entirely of impervious surfaces. Sixty-six Tech-IA® floating elements, supporting four plants each, were laid on the water surface. Eleven species of herbaceous perennial helophyte plants, with ornamental features, were used and tested.

The Peloponnese, a province of the Byzantine Empire in the 11th and 12th centuries, was divided into three distinct political entities after 1204: the Frankish Principality of Achaia, the Venetian colonies of Modon and Coron, and the Byzantine lands in the southeast. The number and size of cities in the Peloponnese during the 11th and 12th centuries expanded, and the establishment of the new political entities of the 13th century did not hinder the development of its urban centers. New urban centers appeared, and the dynamics of the old urban centers witnessed a major shift.

Very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery from Google Earth and Microsoft Bing Maps is increasingly being used in a variety of applications from computer sciences to arts and humanities. In the field of remote sensing, one use of this imagery is to create reference data sets through visual interpretation, e.g., to complement existing training data or to aid in the validation of land-cover products. Through new applications such as Collect Earth, this imagery is also being used for monitoring purposes in the form of statistical surveys obtained through visual interpretation.