Land issues, exploitation of natural resources, and Forests of Rural Communities in the periphery of Kinshasa, DRC. Peri-urban forests are under strong anthropic pressure. Any activity needs a previous identification of stakeholders, landscape perception, socio-economic trends in local communities and their relationships with land and natural resources. Kinshasa (capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC) is a 10 millions inhabitants city with rapid growth and increasing impacts on surrounding villages linked with forest natural resources.

Research was conducted in northern Namibia to document and investigate the value of local knowledge connected with soil and land management, in particular with respect to the cultivation of grain legumes. Participatory approaches were used to describe and map the indigenous land unit (ILU) classification system in four villages. Soil and crop analyses indicated good correspondence between conventional productivity assessments and farmers' more qualitative descriptions of the ILUs.

Recent observations show that human-induced climate change (CC) and land transformation (LT) are threatening wildlife globally. Thus, there is a need to assess the sensitivity of wildlife on large spatial scales and evaluate whether national parks (NPs), a key conservation tools used to protect species, will meet their mandate under future CC and LT conditions. Here, we assess the sensitivity of 277 mammals at African scale to CC at 10[prime] resolution, using static LT assumptions in a 'first-cut' estimate, in the absence of credible future LT trends.

Grasslands in South Africa have been extensively transformed and fragmented, but are poorly protected. Commercial afforestation poses a particular threat to grassland biodiversity because areas suitable for forestry coincide with those supporting the greatest richness of endemic and threatened biota. To comply with international forestry standards, commercial timber growers leave “ecological networks” of interconnected open corridors within plantations: however, the value of these networks for conservation is unclear.

The impacts of agricultural practices and landscape composition on bee communities were investigated in 14 sites located in four Western European countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland). Standardized interviews with farmers assessed agricultural practices in terms of agricultural inputs (nitrogen fertilization and pesticides), livestock density and crop types. The proportion of semi-natural habitats was calculated for each site. We showed negative effects of agricultural intensification on species richness, abundance and diversity of wild bees.

Agricultural landscapes provide the essential ecosystem service of food to growing human populations; at the same time, agricultural expansion to increase crop production results in forest fragmentation, degrading many other forest‐dependent ecosystem services. However, surprisingly little is known about the role that forest fragments play in the provision of ecosystem services and how fragmentation affects landscape multifunctionality at scales relevant to land management decisions.

There is a long-standing debate in Scotland over the use of upland areas, as initiatives to restore the native Caledonian pine forest are vying with traditional moorland management for shooting. Our study set out to improve our understanding of argumentation processes with regard to these issues. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a wide range of local people, including both stakeholders with professional interests and randomly contacted members of the public. We then explored the frames that our interview partners chose in interaction with us to make sense of the interviews.

The spread of industrial civilizations has been particularly traumatic for the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Manifestations of this include expatriation from ancestral lands, sickness, poverty, and environmental degradation. Northern Australia has been no exception despite remaining a stronghold of Aboriginal cultures and still containing vast areas of relatively intact landscapes. Most Aboriginal people reside in remote settlements where they remain on the negative extreme of basic indicators such as life expectancy and educational attainment.

Although there are efforts underway to educate the public on landscape planning and land management, educational efforts geared toward children have been limited. This study recognizes the importance of landscape planning education, children's inherent spatial cognition, and their observational and creative skills. However, there are limited opportunities for children to be landscape planners and the elements children believe are important in the design and planning of their ideal community are unknown.

Geomorphologic and hydrologic research heavily depends on digital elevation models (DEM) which are currently being prepared from digital contours. The present study examines the use and applicability of freely available global elevation data source (3 arc seconds finished Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)) in landform characterisation, geomorphometry, river basin studies and other allied scientific applications in comparison with contour elevation data derived from the surveyed topographical sheets.