Habitat degradation poses a great threat to biodiversity conservation. Abundance and diversity of butterflies is an indicator of good environmental health. Understanding how different butterfly species respond to habitat degradation is a necessary step towards the development of effective measures to enhance environmental protection. This study investigated the impact of land use patterns on the diversity, abundance, and conservation status of butterflies in the Kisii highlands; a densely-populated region in Kenya that has received little attention in ecological studies.

The rapid development of the Vietnamese coffee industry caused widespread deforestation, land degradation, desertification, and soil and water degradation in the late 1990s. However, little is known about the impact of intensification of coffee farming on arthropod diversity in Vietnamese coffee agroecosystems.

Despite decades of attention by conservationists, deforestation remains a critical problem in Latin America, particularly in agricultural frontiers like the Amazon and the lowlands of Central America. The limited impact of conservation initiatives in such regions stems partly from a poor understanding of the socioeconomic and land use dynamics that typify frontiers. Moreover, conservation organizations tend to disregard the economic and policy factors at various scales that contribute to deforestation pressures in developing countries.

Urban planners are increasingly interested in agriculture around cities and have to decide whether to maintain or not areas of agricultural land use within and close to growing cities. There is therefore a need for researchers to design tools to guide public decision-making on land use. Various approaches, originating from different disciplines, may be adopted in this respect. We designed an interdisciplinary research program in order to test two related concepts: the “sustainability” and the “multi-functionality” of agriculture.

Ecological restoration is increasingly called on to provide ecosystem services (ES) valuable to humans, as well as to benefit biodiversity and improve wildlife habitat. Where mechanisms to pay for ES exist, they may serve as incentives to embark on habitat restoration projects. We evaluated the potential of newly established carbon markets in the United States to incentivize afforestation along riparian corridors, by comparing the income earnable by carbon offset credits with the costs of planting, maintaining, and registering such a restoration project in California.

This paper explores farming landscapes in Orkney, Scotland, focusing particularly on local responses to the rise of the environmental movement and agri-environmental schemes. It argues that where institutional designations of ‘nature’ tended to invoke a generalised temporal stasis, local and regional understandings of ‘landscape’ emphasise specific histories, transience, and movement.

Recently, extreme meteorological events have occurred frequently owing to climate change and its influence. Impacts of concentrated precipitation events include the damage caused by landslides. Many areas in Gangwondo (Korea) are located at high elevation and have large elevation differences; these areas are thus at high risk of landslides. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the landslide hazard of the province using representative concentration pathways (RCP) scenarios 4.5 and 8.5 and to compare results.

Agricultural land abandonment and the consequent natural forest regrowth in areas once cultivated has significantly transformed Alpine ecosystems and landscapes. In this paper, we estimated the loss of agricultural areas due to reafforestation in the Belluno Province (Eastern Italian Alps) and integrated socioeconomic indicators with topographical features to evaluate the drivers of this change.

The socio-economic changes of the last decades have resulted in changes in traditional land uses with consequent abandonment of large farmland areas in the Mediterranean region. We assessed the response of species richness and composition, and species functional traits to decreasing land use intensity in a Montado system, an agro-pastoral system characteristic of the Alentejo, Southern Portugal. Additionally, we investigated whether plant functional types can be established based on the response to decreasing land use intensity in these systems.

We applied an intermediate disturbance-complexity approach to the land-use change of cultural landscapes in the island of Mallorca from c. 1850 to the present, which accounts for the joint behaviour of human appropriation of photosynthetic capacity used as a measure of disturbance, and a selection of land metrics at different spatial scales that account for ecological functionality as a proxy of biodiversity. We also delved deeper into local land-use changes in order to identify the main socioeconomic drivers and ruling agencies at stake.

The multifunctionality of agriculture promoted by the Agriculture Act is difficult to reconcile with the intensive models dominant in Guadeloupe and Reunion. This is made clear by an analysis of the management rules and practices for territorial farming contracts, intended to implement this Act. The difficulty of this reconciliation can also be observed by the impact that the statute’s application has had on its targets — production units. We conducted open or conversation interviews with institutional personnel and with farmers who have signed these contracts.

Data on humification is important to assessing the rate and magnitude of soil carbon (C) sequestration. Thus, this study assessed the humification degree (HLIF) of soil organic matter (SOM) and the changes in functional C groups (aromatic-C and aliphatic-C) for contrasting land use and management practices (native vegetation (NV), conventional plow-based tillage (CT) and no-till (NT) systems) in sub-tropical and tropical Brazilian environments. Experiments were conducted at Ponta Grossa (PG) in Paraná State and Lucas do Rio Verde (LRV) in Mato Grosso State of Brazil.