This issue of Unasylva analyses the urban forestry situation and considers its potential for increasing living standards in different urban settings.

High-precision land-cover-land-use GIS mapping was performed in four major townships in Maine’s Aroostook River Valley, using on-screen digitization and direct interpretation of very high spatial resolution satellite multispectral imagery (15–60 cm) and high spatial resolution LiDAR data (2 m) and the field mapping method. The project not only provides the first-ever high-precision land-use maps for northern Maine, but it also yields accurate hectarage estimates of different land-use types, in particular grassland, defined as fallow land, pasture, and hay field.

Kenya is going through a period of intense transition. The country's main development policy, Vision 2030, is just entering the second Medium Term Plan of Implementation from 2013. The development priorities focus extensively on large scale investments, for industrial, irrigated agriculture, utilization of newly discovered natural resources, and infrastructure development. Land is therefore a central commodity for realization of the sought after socioeconomic transformation.

The Cadastral system in Kenya was established in 1903 to support land alienation for the white settlers who had come into the country in the early part of the 20th Century. In the last hundred years, the system has remained more or less the same, where land records are kept in paper format and majority of operations are carried out on a manual basis. The lack of a modern cadastral system has contributed to problems in land administration in the country.

Multicriteria-Spatial Decision Support Systems (MC-SDSS) are increasingly popular tools in decision-making processes and in policy making, thanks to their significant new capabilities in the use of spatial or geospatial information. Many spatial problems are complex and require the use of integrated analysis and models. The present paper illustrates the development of a MC-SDSS approach for studying the ecological connectivity of the Piedmont Region in Italy.

This study was carried out to assess the land suitability for rainfed faba bean (Vicia faba L.) cultivation in Gonbad-Kavous region (Golestan province, north of Iran) using geographic information system (GIS) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP), the most common methods for evaluation of land use suitability. Several parameters were considered in this study, including the annual average, minimum and maximum temperatures, annual precipitation, slope, elevation, and some soil properties such as organic matter, pH, EC, texture, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, iron, and zinc.

The Huang-Huai-Hai Plain is the most important winter wheat and maize production region in China. In response to the increasing population pressure, the Chinese authorities strongly invested in improving the irrigation systems and increasing ground and surface water exploitation within the plain to increase the crop productivity. This resulted in a reduction of water resource availability and in turn indirectly affected the suitability of various agricultural ecosystems in the plain.

The main objective of this research was to compare the suitability of land for surface and drip irrigation methods according to a parametric evaluation system in the plains west of the city of Shush, in south‐west Iran. After analysing and evaluating soil properties, suitability maps were generated for both methods by means of remote sensing (RS) and a geographic information system (GIS). The results showed that 9031 ha (21.5%) of the studied area was highly suitable for surface irrigation methods, whereas 32 500 ha (77.5%) of the study area was highly suitable for drip irrigation methods.