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The land-cover changes in the cloud forest and coastal plain of Dhofar, Oman, from 1988 to 2013 are reported, and their possible causes explored. Multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis, cluster analysis using local indicators of spatial association, and trend analysis of NDVI time series are used to measure environmental changes. The results demonstrate: systematic degradation and loss of vegetation types in the cloud forest; loss of native land covers to impervious surfaces on the coastal plain; decreases in woody plant vegetation in almost half of the cloud forest in distinctive hotspots of loss; and significant decreases in NDVI trends around the city of Salalah, along the coastal plain, and in parts of the cloud forest. The proximate drivers of these changes in the cloud forest appear to be changes in grazing activities, while the growth of Salalah, especially its peri-urban area, altered the coastal plain. These drivers, in turn, are linked to distal ones, foremost changes in Omani policies and investments in the Dhofar area, traced to government responses to the Dhofar War (1970–1975), which have resulted in increased livestock populations and urban growth.

The growing awareness about the need to anticipate the future of land systems focuses on how well we understand the interactions between society and environmental processes within a complexity framework. A major barrier to understanding is insufficient attention given to long (multidecadal) temporal perspectives on complex system behavior that can provide insights through both analog and evolutionary approaches. Analogs are useful in generating typologies of generic system behavior, whereas evolutionary assessments provide insight into site-specific system properties. Four dimensions of these properties: (1) trends and trajectories, (2) frequencies, thresholds and alternate steady states, (3) slow and fast processes, and (4) legacies and contingencies, are discussed. Compilations and analyses of past information and data from instruments and observations, palaeoenvironmental archives, and human and environmental history are now the subject of major international effort. The embedding of empirical information over multidecadal timescales in attempts to define and model sustainable and adaptive management of land systems is now not only possible, but also necessary.

An authoritative desk-top reference work for students of geography, the environment and sustainability, which through a series of 101 interconnected questions and answers spanning ten thematic sections, provides a comprehensive survey of humankind's impact on the global environment from the Late Stone Age to the present day.

No detailed description available for \"Pulltrouser Swamp\".

This highly topical study of tropical deforestation reports on the first phase of a large, integrated, multi-institutional, and team-based study. Based in Mexico, it is designed to understand and project land changes in a development frontier that pits the rapidly growing needs of smallholder farmers to cut down forests for cultivation against fede.

The first vulnerability framework for sustainability science was published about two decades ago. It embedded vulnerability analysis into the foundational lens of sustainability and resilience research - the social-environmental system (SES) - and called for an integration of the vulnerabilities of the social and environmental subsystems as opposed to the dominating attention given at the time to societal vulnerability. The framework recognised that the environment itself is vulnerable to disturbances and that the interactions of the two subsystems create a system-wide vulnerability central to questions of sustainability or sustainable development. It also provided multiple components of analysis that should be considered if vulnerability research and assessments were to contribute more fully to sustainability themes. Using bibliometric analysis and attention to subsequent vulnerability publications, various impacts of this original framework on vulnerability studies were examined in the study, including its recognition by citations, citation pathways and fields of study, and the degree to which its various dimensions were employed. It was found that its large citation recognition was not necessarily matched by attention to the dimensions the framework proposed, noting several exceptions. The authors interpreted this discrepancy to have followed from the analytical complexity fostered by the framework and to the significant proportion of vulnerability interests that was and remains focused on societal vulnerability as opposed to the social-environmental one, even in this moment in which sustainability in the Anthropocene has become a paramount query.

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—“win–wins” are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.

The present article is a rebuttal to the paper presented by Henrickson (2010), in which he contends that Turner (2004) did not properly typify the species concerned, nor did he adequately justify its biological status. Evidence and discussion are presented here that it indeed is typified properly and that its biological status justifies recognition at specific rank. El presente artículo es una refutación al presentado por Henrickson (2010), en el que sostiene que Turner (2004) no tipificó adecuadamente la especie implicada, ni justifico apropiadamente su status biológico. Se presentan aquí la pruebas y discusión de que está tipificada adecuadamente y que su status biológico justifica su reconocimiento en el rango específico.