The concept of land consolidation is new in Latvia. Its main tasks are to eliminate land fragmentation and to facilitate farms of optimal size. One of the most important preconditions of land consolidation is forming of optimal size farmland plots in property and use, and land fragmentation, which has a major impact on both the operating conditions and other rural development processes. Land fragmentation affects not only land management, but it also increases transport costs.

The European Union Rural Development Policy (RDP) for the period 2007–2013 seeks to establish a coherent and sustainable framework for the future of Europe's rural areas and is closely related to the improvement of living conditions in the countryside involving aspects of housing, the environment, infrastructure, communication, employment possibilities, land management, etc. Such interventions are very welcome in many Central and Eastern European countries where land reform after the collapse of the Soviet regime has resulted in a worrying drift towards rural depopulation.

Communal forests, or Montes Veciñais en Man Común (MVMC), are a specific form of communal land tenure and a singular legal category in Galicia, a region in Northwest Spain. MVMC extend over one third of the area of the region. Over the years, MVMC have undergone many changes in terms of ownership and resource management. Such changes have resulted in land tenure insecurity among current landowners, who live in rural areas.

CONTEXT: The urban heat island (UHI) is a well-documented pattern of warming in cities relative to rural areas. Most UHI research utilizes remote sensing methods at large scales, or climate sensors in single cities surrounded by standardized land cover. Relatively few studies have explored continental-scale climatic patterns within common urban microenvironments such as residential landscapes that may affect human comfort.

In 2004, four focus groups consisting of agricultural landowners were organized in Northcentral Iowa to assess opportunities for hunting along in-field shelterbelts and on adjacent lands. A majority of respondents (95%) allowed/practiced some hunting on their lands. About 55% of respondents indicated that the potential existed for developing a fee hunting market associated with in-field shelterbelts.

In the Republic of Panama, reforestation with native species is of great interest, but many landholders often do not participate in tree planting projects and little information exists about landholder interest in, or experiences with, native trees. This study evaluates the experiences of farmers participating in a native species reforestation initiative in rural Panama to identify lessons learned that can guide on-going or future tree planting efforts.

This paper examines gender differences in awareness, preparedness and attitudes towards bushfire amongst landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. It considers the potential of conceptualising bushfire not as a gender-neutral natural phenomenon but as an important means by which traditional gender roles and power relations within rural landscapes are maintained. Landholders were found to uphold conventional views of bushfire management as “men’s business” despite changing social circumstances.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was developed an information model for the provision of use and protection of arable lands taking into consideration the main sources and factors of anthropogenic influence on land resources. The model of information supply of the usage and protection of agricultural lands took into account data about their initial (base) condition and data about current changes, as well as analytical and archive data. It reflected ecological-economic side of management of land resources.

In 2007, an epizootic of equine influenza (EI) occurred in Australia, involving parts of the states of Queensland and New South Wales. Following an extensive control program, the disease was eradicated within 4 months, after infecting more than 75 000 horses on over 10 000 properties. In Queensland, examination of land use patterns revealed that the majority of infected premises (89.5%) were located in one of three land use classes viz. rural residential, residential-unspecified or grazing natural vegetation.

Quantifying the urban landscape pattern and its change is fundamental for monitoring and assessing the ecological and socio-economic consequences of urbanization. Using Indian Remote Sensing Panchromatic (IRS-PAN) imagery of 2002 and combining gradient analysis with landscape metrics, we compared the landscape patterns between metropolises and small-sized cities with increasing grain size. Landscape metrics were computed along a 51 × 9 km transect cutting across Shanghai and a 16 × 2 km transect cutting across Zhangjiagang with a moving window.