Search results for "Land Use"
showing 10 items of 333 documents
Automated Soil Moisture Monitoring Wireless Sensor Network for Long-Term Cal/Val Applications
2012
The design and development of a wireless sensor network for soil moisture measurement in an unlevelled 10 km × 10 km area, is described. It was specifically deployed for the characterization of a reference area, in campaigns of calibration and validation of the space mission SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), but the system is easily extensible to monitor other climatic or environmental variables, as well as to other regions of ecological interest. The network consists of a number of automatic measurement stations, strategically placed following soil homogeneity and land uses criteria. Every station includes acquisition, conditioning and communication systems. The electronics are batt…
Spatial Autocorrelation in Econometric Land Use Models: An Overview
2021
International audience; This chapter provides an overview of the literature on econometric land use models including spatial autocorrelation. These models are useful to analyze the determinants of land use changes and to study their implications for the environment (carbon stocks, water quality, biodiversity, ecosystem services). Recent methodological advances in spatial econometrics have improved the quality of econometric models allowing them to identify more precisely the determinants of land use changes and make more accurate land use predictions. We review the current state of the literature on studies which account explicitly for spatial autocorrelation in econometric land use models …
Potential implications of climate change and urbanization on watershed hydrology
2017
Abstract This paper proposes a modeling framework able to analyze the alterations in watershed hydrology induced by two recurrent drivers for hydrological changes: climate change and urbanization. The procedure is based on the coupling of a stochastic weather generator with a land use change model for the generation of some hypothetical scenarios. The generated scenarios are successively used to force a physically-based and spatial distributed hydrological model to reconstruct the basin response under different conditions. Several potential climate alterations are simulated by imposing negative and positive variations in the mean annual precipitation and a simultaneous temperature increase.…
The (Evolving) vineyard’s age structure in the valencian community, Spain. A new demographic approach for rural development and landscape analysis
2019
Vineyards have assumed a key role as rural landmarks in recent decades. Investigating vineyard dynamics and contexts may reveal various economic, cultural, and environmental aspects of rural landscapes, which can be linked to land-use changes and major soil degradation processes, including soil erosion. As a contribution to rural landscape studies, the purpose of this work is to investigate the spatial distribution of vineyard plots in the Valencian community, located in the eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula, focusing on the final product, the type of vineyard and how long each vineyard has been settled over time. The work provides a comprehensive analysis of a wine-growing landscape, c…
Path dependency and landscape biographies in Latgale, Latvia: a comparative analysis
2010
This paper focuses on the path dependency of landscapes in Latgale, Latvia from the present perspective at the regional and local scale. During the last centuries Latvia's landscapes have passed through radical changes, which were driven by political events. Each new political era discarded the ideas of the previous era and subsequently reorganized the land(scape) according to the new views. At the regional level the role of history is significant in analyzing landscapes while at the local level the main force is people, often themselves not knowing the history of the place but putting the existing path dependency into practise or disregarding it. The biographies of two former villages are …
Integrating soil survey, land use management and political ecology: A case study in a border area between Peru and Ecuador
2013
In Latin America countries, competition for access to natural resources among different groups has been a major reason for the outburst of violence over the last decades. One of the main aims of the political ecology concerns the understanding of the environmental conditions that can underlies the social conflict among people. Such understanding needs to be based on a detailed investigation of the natural resources of the landscape, mainly the soils. Few years ago the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs financed a soil survey with a humanitarian purpose: the development of a peace plan between Peru and Ecuador by improving the socio-economic conditions of the rural populations living in th…
Climate and land-use changes as determinants of lesser kestrel Falco naumanni abundance in Mediterranean cereal steppes (Sicily)
2010
Monitoring of lesser kestrels Falco naumanni is necessary to promote conservation of this vulnerable species. To this end, 35 colonies of this species located in the NNW and SE of Sicily were monitored from 2003 to 2009. Counts of the active colonies and resident pairs were modelled by loglinear Poisson regressions to assess population trends over the study period. Afterwards, a GLM with an analysis of covariance design and a backward removal stepwise regression was performed to relate the observed trend to local- or global-scale climatic variation and to local land-use changes. Colony counts provided a better fit to the loglinear models than pair counts. Loglinear models separated the incr…
The influence of land use on the genetic structure of populations of the common frog Rana temporaria
1990
In order to find out the influence of land use and topographic distance on the genetic structure of populations of the common frog Rana temporaria L. in the Saar-Palatinate lowlands (Federal Republic of Germany), tissue of larvae was examined by means of horizontal starch gel electrophoresis. A total of 24 loci coding for 14 different enzymes were studied. Genotype frequencies, allele frequencies and mean heterozygosity were calculated, and genetic distances using Nei's formula. Strong deviations from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were found; the degree of homozygosity was higher than expected. Separation by highways reduced average heterozygosity as well as genetic polymorphism of local p…
An Inventory Approach to the Assessment of Main Traditional Landscapes in Sicily (Central Mediterranean Basin)
2012
EU policy for the conservation of cultural landscapes is of particular importance for a region such as Sicily (Italy) which is the site of many Mediterranean traditional cultural landscapes as well as new landscapes created by contemporary agriculture. Such variety of landscape, however, is not supported or confirmed by specialised inventories that identify and classify the typical Main Traditional Landscape (MTL). On the basis of these considerations, the objective of the present paper is to draw up a preliminary inventory and present a brief characterisation of MTLs in Sicily, in line with the multidisciplinary experiences and approaches implemented at European and national levels. In def…
Air pollution and childhood leukaemia: a nationwide case-control study in Italy
2013
Objectives Leukaemia is the most common cancer in children, but its aetiology is still poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that traffic-related air pollution is associated with paediatric leukaemia because of chronic exposure to several potential carcinogens. Methods The Italian SETIL study (Study on the aetiology of lymphohematopoietic malignancies in children) was conducted in 14 Italian regions. All incident cases of leukaemia in children aged ≤10 years from these regions (period 1998–2001) were eligible for enrolment. Two controls per case, matched on birth date, gender and region of residence were randomly selected from the local population registries. Exposure assessment at bi…