Understanding the local socioeconomic context is important for the design of appropriate conservation initiatives and associated monitoring strategies, especially in areas with high degrees of inequality, to ensure conservation interventions do not inadvertently further disadvantage vulnerable people. Typical assessments of wealth inequality in remote rural areas are constrained by limited engagement with a cash economy, complex family and tribal ties, and an absence of basic infrastructure.

Incorporating public or local preferences in landscape planning is often discussed with respect to the difficulties associated with accurate representation, stimulating interest and overcoming barriers to participation. Incorporating sectoral and professional preferences may also have the same degree of difficulty where conflicts can arise. Planning theory calls for inclusiveness and collaboration, ideally egalitarian, and analysis of the process often uses case study scenarios that may offer examples for practice and further research.

This paper is a critical synthesis of the causes, effects and challenges of the Sahelian droughts. The results show that the four main causes of the Sahelian droughts are as follows: sea surface temperature changes, vegetation and land degradation, dust feedbacks and human-induced climate change. However, human-induced climate change is seen as the major drought-determining factor because it controls sea surface temperatures, dust feedbacks and vegetation degradation.

Two Landsat images, acquired in 1987 and 2008, were analyzed to evaluate desertification processes in central North Kurdufan State (Sudan). Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) and multitemporal comparison techniques (change vector analysis) were applied to estimate the long-term desertification/re-growing of vegetation cover over time and in space. Site-specific interactions between natural processes and human activity played a pivotal role in desertification. Over the last 21 years, desertification significantly prevailed over vegetation re-growth, particularly in areas around rural villages.

Aquaculture continues to diversify and develop rapidly in Bangladesh. A major change has taken place in parts of Bangladesh due to the growth of floodplain aquaculture (FPA) projects. FPA involves the enclosure by the landholders of parts of the floodplain through the creation of embankments and sluice gates. The enclosed water body is stocked with fish seed and the benefits are distributed amongst those who own land in the impounded area.

Selection of rural buildings’ site is a complex process to solve a discordant relation with other components of rural landscapes and needs many diverse criteria to deal with its situation. This paper presents a multi-criteria spatial decision analysis approach using geographic information system (GIS) technique for evaluating the suitability of rural buildings site selection with a case study in Hervás (northern Extremadura region), Spain.

Guaranteeing households’ equal access to land has long been advocated as paramount to implement development policies in Rural China. Given the chronic land scarcity in densely populated regions of China, finding a compromise between private and collective land rights has been important to protect livelihood safety nets and to address poverty issues in rural areas, especially in the initial stages of reform.

As rural landscapes experience increasing levels of residential development, the persistence of species that rely on them will depend on informed planning and management decisions. An understanding of habitat requirements is essential for setting priorities and developing landscape-level plans for the survival of these species. In many temperate rural landscapes, artificially created ponds may be the only wetlands available for aquatic reproduction by amphibians.

To justify the importance of the indicators affecting the cadastral value, surveys were carried out, by help of which opinions of different respondent groups were summarized. The interviewed respondent groups were real property specialists of municipalities and experts. The thematic blocks of the questions included in the questionnaires are designed with the aim to clarify the quality of the indicators of cadastral assessment models, as well as their significance.

The paper describes the main phases and results of a study which is part of a broader research programme aimed at assessing the changes that have occurred in Italian rural landscapes since the Second World War. The research deals with the definition of a methodology suitable for analysing the changes in the rural built environment over wide areas. This methodology focuses on the definition of representative sample areas aimed to reduce survey costs while allowing results to be characterised by a known and provable degree of reliability and precision.

The present e-collection of scientific works deals with results of research on issues of economy, agrarian and engineering sciences studied by researchers, post-graduate students, magisters and students of Mykolayiv State Agrarian Univ. and other educational establishments of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine are elucidated. The issue comprises 32 scientific papers, distributed by three sections, in particular Economic sciences (23 papers), Agricultural sciences (7) and Engineering sciences (2 papers), and, what is important, except the Ukrainian-language contents (pp.