As global urban populations grow, green spaces in cities are under increasing pressure to provide urban habitat and perform important ecosystem services. While public natural areas are typically called upon to provide key habitat in cities, green spaces on private property make up large parts of the urban land base and provide important roles for habitat and ecosystem services that support city function. However voluntary strategies for encouraging ecological stewardship on private property in cities are not well studied.

Ventenata dubia is an exotic annual grass that has become increasingly invasive in various perennial grass systems throughout the Intermountain Pacific Northwest. Currently, little information is available to landowners about herbicide control options. In our first field study, we evaluated V. dubia control efficacy and perennial grass tolerance of herbicides applied pre-emergence (PRE) at two locations and as an early postemergence (EPOST) application at four different conservation reserve grasslands, with each grassland dominated by different perennial grass species.

The beginning of the restitutional land reallocation reform in 1991 brought a rapid change in agricultural land utilisation and user groups resulting in the decrease of state land users’ categories and the growth of private agricultural land areas used by farmers and other natural and legal entities. The aim of the article is to analyse the stability of farmers farms and their agricultural areas in Lithuania during the period between 2009 and 2014.

Financial incentives have become a core component of private lands conservation programmes because of their ability to motivate stewardship behaviour. Concern exists about the durability of stewardship behaviours after payments end. Payments for performance may impact farmers' current and future engagement with an incentive programme to protect an at-risk ground-nesting grassland bird. Farmer motivations for participating in the programme, as well as their intention to continue the programme if the financial incentive no longer existed, were quantified.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) projects are being designed and implemented across tropical countries, intending to curb the contribution of deforestation to greenhouse gas emissions. An important aspect of REDD implementation is the baseline against which reductions are measured. The baseline estimates the business-as-usual emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. We solve a dynamic model of land conversion from forest to agriculture in the presence of REDD, and assess the performance of four baselines.

Non-industrial private forest is the dominant ownership type in the eastern USA. Most of the private owners have non-consumptive, appreciative values and through surveys report little interest in the generation of timber revenue. Timber harvesting in Massachusetts was investigated for a 25-year period to compare the frequency and volume of harvests for five commercial species on private land, to species-specific stumpage prices reported on a quarterly basis.

Using data collected from a series of focus groups, this study examines how landowner assistance programs (which may include management plans, cost-share, technical assistance and advice, and education components) affect family forest owner behaviour in the USA. Not surprisingly, most owners who participated in assistance programs had pre-existing management objectives.

As forest areas have become increasingly relevant to the public as recreational landscapes, and outdoor recreation is increasingly diverse and specialized, we explore how notions of property and issues of public access are made relevant in controversies over hunting rights in Norway. Focusing on responses of local hunters to landowners’ recent promotion of hunting tourism, one central finding is that the hunters tend to engage with the hunting grounds as part of landscapes they identify strongly with.

CONTEXT: Landscape heterogeneity (the composition and configuration of matrix habitats) plays a major role in shaping species communities in wooded-agricultural landscapes. However, few studies consider the influence of different types of semi-natural and linear habitats in the matrix, despite their known ecological value for biodiversity.

There is increasing interest in plantations with the objective of producing biomass for energy and fuel. These types of plantations are called Short Rotation Woody Crops (SRWC). Popular SRWC species are Eucalypt (Eucalyptus spp.), Cottonwood (Populus deltoides) and Willow (Salix spp.). These species have in common strong growth rates, the ability to coppice, and rotations of 2–10 years.

Forested riparian buffers isolate streams from the influence of harvesting operations that can lead to water temperature increases. Only forest cover between the sun and stream limits stream warming, but that cover also reduces in-stream photosynthesis, aquatic insect production, and fish productivity. Water temperature increases that occur as streams flow through canopy openings decrease rapidly downstream, in as little as 150 m.

Due to an aging landowner population, there will be an unprecedented ownership shift in land-based assets in the USA. Approximately 2.7 million family forest owners (FFOs) in the USA over the age of 55 years old, reflecting 80 % of all FFO-owned land, will be deciding the future ownership and use of their land, having significant implications for the landscapes and public benefits these forests provide. Little is known about how FFOs plan for the future ownership and use of their land.