The conflict of land use between food and energy security purposes has become an important issue since biofuel has been promoted as alternative energy. However, understanding of the dynamics of land use derived from the advent of biofuel crops is mostly based on extrapolations using computer simulations. In order to gain a better understanding, this research aims to comprehend the dynamics of land use via the implications of the perspectives, motivations and behaviours of local landowners and the government, and the impacts of land use change on the relevant stakeholders. The dynamics of land use are explored in the context of an oil palm based-biodiesel development in Thailand where the advent of oil palm has caused the loss of paddy areas. A sequential mixed-method strategy, including in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey with 10 and 180 landowners respectively, indicates that the probability that the landowner switched traditional land for oil palm cultivation is affected by the The key findings indicate that, even though the issue of loss of paddy areas used to be of serious concern to policy makers at the beginning phase of developing the biofuel project, they no longer took official interest in it after launching the project. The results also reveal that the substitution of oil palm in some paddy areas was readily accepted because switching to oil palm was seen to contribute to a better livelihood for farmers and also alleviates the fiscal encumbrance of assisting paddy farmers. In addition, the inertia in dealing with losses of paddy areas also reflected the traditions of the civil service system in that civil servants actively respond to the current needs of the political sector whereas policies which are not paid serious attention by the political sector, like the losses of paddy, are temporarily ignored. household characteristics (age and education of the head of household, number of household farming labourers, amount and source of income, land size and land right). Moreover, the results indicate that success of switching land to oil palm cultivation was determined by several factors influencing willingness (factors relevant to outcome expectation and social networks and connections) and capacity to change (factors relevant to finance, labour, capital, land rights and transportation). The results regarding impacts of land use switching from analysis of secondary data from the input-output national accounts of Thailand reveal that switching paddy areas to oil palm cultivation would clearly provide better financial contributions to all stakeholders in the supply chain and to the whole economy. However, the impact of switching land use from rubber to oil palm would benefit some stakeholders (input providers and transporters at the crop farming stage and input providers and entrepreneurs at the industrial processing stage), while the farmers and other stakeholders would lose. In order to explore the policy makers' perspectives on the issue of land competition between paddy and oil palm, in-depth interviews with three policy makers in the biofuel policy-making process were undertaken, as well as a literature review of secondary data. The key findings indicate that, even though the issue of loss of paddy areas used to be of serious concern to policy makers at the beginning phase of developing the biofuel project, they no longer took official interest in it after launching the project. The results also reveal that the substitution of oil palm in some paddy areas was readily accepted because switching to oil palm was seen to contribute to a better livelihood for farmers and also alleviates the fiscal encumbrance of assisting paddy farmers. In addition, the inertia in dealing with losses of paddy areas also reflected the traditions of the civil service system in that civil servants actively respond to the current needs of the political sector whereas policies which are not paid serious attention by the political sector, like the losses of paddy, are temporarily ignored.

Literature review and past empirical work suggests that a resource based model of geodiversity may be a useful proxy for biodiversity within tropical mountains and could provide a valuable conservation planning tool. Here, geodiversity is defined as variation in overall resource availability, along with spatial and temporal (seasonal) variation in resource availability. Using freely available pan-tropical datasets at a 1 km resolution, a spatial model of geodiversity that is informed by an understanding of ecological processes was developed and tested before being used to address three research questions: 1. Is there a quantifiable relationship between geodiversity and biodiversity? 2. Do areas included in multiple conservation prioritisation schemes include a higher proportion of geodiversity than would be expected by chance? 3. What are the likely impacts of climate change on the spatial distribution of current geodiversity classes and what might be the implications of this with respect to the suitability of current protected area configuration in tropical mountains to protect geodiversity and thus biodiversity into the future? Some support for a relationship between geodiversity and biodiversity was found across a range of spatial aggregations and a variety of taxa, however a full validation of this relationship was not possible due to a lack of suitable validation data. It was found that areas rated as valuable on a greater number of conservation prioritisation schemes do not conserve a greater proportion of geodiversity or biodiversity than would be expected by coverage alone or from a random selection. The impacts of climate change on geodiversity were evaluated in terms of change from current conditions under three SRES scenarios and based on projected temperature and precipitation as a mean of five GCM. It was found that there will be significant changes to the current state of geodiversity by the period 2040-2060 and 2080-2100, with the most severe changes occurring by the 2040-2060 period. The implications of these findings are considered in detail for protected areas within Colombia and suggestions for climate change stable conservation strategies are made. It is concluded that the model of geodiversity proposed in this thesis has potential to become a useful conservation tool when considering the effectiveness of current protected areas, and changes in geodiversity due to climate change.

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Land use models are valuable in helping land mangers and policy makers to assess changes and predict the impact of these changes in land use on the resource base. However, the incorporation of the relevant factors still presents a major challenge in modelling of land use. This research proposed and tested a new approach to land use change modelling which incorporates socio-economic and biophysical aspects of land use. The study made use of spatial morphological indices in combination with socio-economic factors to model dynamics of urban land use. This approach adopts neural network for the modelling operation while drawing socio-economic data from census survey to represent some of the human dimensions. Bio-physical and environmental information relevant for land use changes was represented in the model by the land use pattern attributes. In order to determine the appropriate set of input variables for the modelling tow methods of feature selections was employed - factor analysis and genetic algorithm. Inputs selected by both methods were tested extensively In different models and the model with the best selection performance was explored for the final land use modelling. This model explored the propensity for change across three different land use classes within the each landscape units across the study area. Overall, spatio-temporal analyses revealed the existence of constant exchange between ecological infrastructure and cultivated land across the study area. These two land use classes are found to going through two fragmentation phases. Furthermore, land use change analysis revealed that socio-economic variables such as means of transport to work and demographic characteristics are relevant identifying the direction of land use change in the study area. In addition to these variables, grain, connectivity, diversity related attributes of the landscape elements are also found to be important explanatory variables. ANN model result shows that two major change associations have the highest tendencies across the study area. They include decreases in cultivated and built-up lands coupled with increases in ecological infrastructures and decreases and/or little (or no) change in cultivated land and ecological infrastructures coupled with increases In built-up land. The results provide insight into the interaction between pattern of land use and socio-economic characteristics and the implication of these interactions for changes in land use.

Urbanization in Sierra Leone is recent. It is a consequence of the colonial era which "brought the slave trade, the production of cash crops geared towards the temperate market, the construction of the railway, modern administration and mining. These have resulted both in changing the traditional settlement pattern of nucleated villages with dispersed hamlets, and in producing ethnic heterogeneity in towns. New settlements, which developed at characteristic places (such as heads of navigation, at confluences, at break of slopes), were founded either by warriors (Kailahun, and Bo), or hunters (Kabala, Matru), or social nonconformists (Magburaka, Yonibana).The resultant urban pattern has been characterized by mutability; the decay of towns, for example, at heads of navigation was compensated by the growth of centres like Bo, Mano, and Segbwema along the rail. Mining, notably diamond mining, led to the mercurial growth of existing towns and the development of small mining settlements without any central place functions. As towns grew, "because of rural-urban migration, there gradually emerged ecological patterns within them. Commerce concentrated in particular sections, recreation in others, and certain functions like education, medicine, and administration occupied relatively quieter peripheral locations where future expansion is feasible. Industries are generally absent from townscapes, and urban house types range from the most modern reinforced concrete buildings to the circular mud hut, although the latter is gradually disappearing. The bulk of the urban population is still engaged in primary activities. Urbanization in Sierra Leone has resulted in many problems, including the absence. In most towns, of social amenities like water supply, electricity and restaurants as well as Inadequate housing facilities for the urbanites, and the Increase in social vices, crimes and delinquency.

Land use, land cover and land management change threatens the sustainability of ecosystem services upon which individuals and communities depend. However, quantifying the effects of large-scale environmental change on regional water resources and climate is challenging because of a lack of appropriate data as well as fundamental limitations of environmental models. This thesis focuses on the development of integrated modelling systems for representing feedback mechanisms between human activities and the environment at regional scales. India is selected as a case study because of the unprecedented scale of environmental change in this country over recent decades. Land use change modelling is identified as a viable method for reconstructing historical land use/land cover at regional scales. This is facilitated through the development of a new modelling framework which allows users to perform the entire modelling workflow in the same environment and provides a consistent interface to different spatial allocation models. Hence, the modelling framework enables model intercomparison and ensemble experiments. It furthermore promotes reproducible science because it allows applications to be expressed programmatically. An adapted version of the Change in Land Use and its Effects (CLUE) land use change model is used to reconstruct historical land use/land cover in India between 1956–2010. The model algorithm explicitly accounts for competition between land use/land cover categories as a result of dynamic socio-economic and biophysical conditions. A further dataset showing the irrigated area of various crops is developed by spatially disaggregating historical agricultural inventory data based on maps of cropland extent and biophysical suitability. Land use/land cover maps are supplied to an offline historical simulation of the Joint UK Land and Environment Simulator (JULES), a process-based land surface model, to generate soil moisture values across the Gangetic plain. Simulated soil moisture values are modified to account for the effects of irrigation. The procedure exploits the characteristics of the irrigated area dataset in order to account for the growing season of individual crops. Existing tools for coordinating complex workflows in the hydrological sciences are strongly coupled to underlying modelling frameworks. As a result, they lack flexibility and often necessitate refactoring of the source code of model components. Exploring these issues further, an experiment is devised in which the data processing language R is set up as a workflow orchestration tool for hydrological data analysis and modelling. A new software package implements a set of classes for representing multi-dimensional hydrological data and to provide a common interface to hydrological models. The experimental set-up is demonstrated through two example applications drawn from hydrology and the emerging discipline of socio-hydrology. These serve to highlight the flexibility of the R system for workflow orchestration and model coupling but also draw attention to several areas for future development.

Land degradation has been a serious environmental problem in dryland areas where moisture supply is limited. This thesis aims to assess vegetation and land cover change in the context of land degradation in the sub-Saharan West Africa, a hotspot of environmental change. The study combines various approaches which include statistical trend analysis of satellite derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) residuals, indigenous knowledge of vegetation changes, and land use land cover change analysis to determine the spatial and temporal changes in vegetation and land cover in the context of land degradation over a 30-year period. Results have shown that, in spite of the ongoing scientific debate around the greening trend observed by satellite data in the past three decades, evidence of land degradation is very pronounced in the region, particularly when a soil moisture index is used in the residual trend analysis to correct for vegetation productivity instead of instantaneous rainfall. They also indicate a declining rate of diversity and density of indigenous wood vegetation species at the study sampling sites (p < 0.05), with nearly 80% of all the identified species found to have become either completely extinct or migrated to a region with sufficient moisture conditions. A continued decrease of closed forest and an increase in croplands were found, with agricultural land use being the major driving force of land cover change, and across the region nearly all the areas found under severe land degradation are croplands. This thesis has shown the importance and relevance of an interdisciplinary approach for land degradation studies. Future studies should go beyond the analysis of NDVI trends based on rainfall as the major driver of vegetation change. Instead, an integrated method should be used which will combine soil moisture, indigenous knowledge of vegetation and land cover and land use conditions as it would provide much more comprehensive data that can be used to support the vulnerable communities in sub-Saharan West Africa whose livelihoods rely on ecological resources.

Countryside recreation is hugely popular and demand is on the rise. Whilst participation should be encouraged, sensitive management is required to reduce associated environmental impacts. This thesis investigates current and future patterns in countryside recreation at multiple spatial scales, from national to site, to explore the potential impacts on biodiversity and enhance the evidence base for conservation interventions. A national-level recreation model is developed from a unique and massive data set of georeferenced recreational visits collected over 3 years, which predicts the probability of visitation as a function of land cover composition and accessibility to and within a site, whilst controlling for source population and socio-demographic differences. Land cover types were subdivided into proportion designated and non-designated for high nature value, using Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) as a proxy. Probability of visitation to preferred land covers, coast and freshwater, decreased when SSSI designated, with no effect for broadleaved woodland. Therefore general recreational use by the public did not represent an important ecosystem service of protected high-nature-value areas. The model was employed to create national- and county-level spatially-explicit predictions of countryside recreation under present and future conditions, the conservation implications of which are discussed. As species conservation requires knowledge of how recreational pressure is distributed throughout a site, a novel methodology was developed using Thetford Forest as a case study. GIS-based Network Analysis was combined with statistical modelling to predict the number of disturbance events from recreationists for all path sections throughout the site. This tool was able to test the consequences of altering site access on the number of hypothetical new woodlark territories likely to become occupied. This study contributes to a relatively small body of work on the importance of biodiversity for recreation and provides novel spatial approaches for quantifying demand and testing conservation interventions.