IPCC, 2000b: Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry.
Most habitats in the Azores have undergone substantial land-use changes and anthropogenic disturbance during the last six centuries.
We studied occupancy, species richness, abundance, and size distributions of snakes on habitat patches that ranged from 0.2 to 120 ha within a landscape undergoing substantial land-use changes.
The Southern Pre-Pyrenees experienced a substantial land-use change over the second half of the 20th century owing to the reduction of agricultural activities towards the formation of a more natural forest landscape.
The modelling results suggest that a 20% decrease in annual rainfall results in a decrease in runoff and sediment yield, thus an ecosystem stabilisation in regard to sediment export, which can only be achieved by a substantial land-use change equivalent to a complete afforestation.
Nevertheless, there are substantial benefits in land use transition from arable to perennials.
Impacts have already occurred and are expected to increase because hundreds of millions of people live near estuaries and rivers that have undergone, and further, are expected to continue to undergo, substantial changes in land use.
Spatiotemporal monitoring of urban settlements showed that within the proposed temporal scope, massive urban development took place while depleting a substantial amount of other land use types.
Such a phenomenon has been observed in specific disease systems, but with substantial change in global land use projected for this century, assessing its global and taxonomic generality would shed light on an important hypothesised driver of environmental synergies or trade-offs between conservation and public health.
There are also substantial concerns the indirect land use approach is fundamentally flawed, for example Zilberman et al.
