Conservation decision-making in transboundary regions presents considerable challenges for protected area managers working in countries with differing languages, laws, and cultures. Collaborative decision analysis has informed real-world conservation decisions in non-transboundary contexts. Here we evaluate for the first time its application in two transboundary regions in Europe: Julian Alps along the Italian–Slovenian border, and the Bavarian–Bohemian Forest along the German–Czech border.

Researchers and policy makers are increasingly looking at the drivers of forest recovery (or forest transition) for inspiration in their search for win-win solutions to deforestation. However, causal generalizations regarding forest transitions are subject to significant problems. First, forest transition theory (FTT), at least in its simplest renditions, tends to emphasize socially benign processes and fails to pay sufficient attention to the causal role—and social impacts—of negative (push) dynamics.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.