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•Increasing urban sprawl in Europe causes land-use conflicts and threatens sustainable land use.•Monitoring of urban sprawl is needed to guide European policy development.•We measure ...urban sprawl at the scales of countries, NUTS-2 regions, and 1-km2 grid.•We identify the regions of highest and lowest levels of urban sprawl.•We propose a European de-sprawling strategy, including targets and limits.
Urban sprawl is a major challenge on the way to sustainable land use as highlighted by the International Year of Soils 2015. Because of increasing awareness of this threat in Europe, there is an urgent need to monitor urban sprawl and to guide European policy development. We found considerable sprawl in Europe at three scales with highly affected regions in the centre and along the Mediterranean coast using recently available consistent data across Europe from the European Copernicus programme. Based on our results, we propose a European de-sprawling strategy, including the implementation of targets and limits, and a set of concrete measures to control urban sprawl and to use land in a more resource-efficient way.
We test a hypothesis about the spatial coincidence of human population density and species richness, and analyze effects of land conversion and ecosystem use on species richness and landscape ...diversity in human dominated Central European country, the Czech Republic. We calculated fraction of aboveground net primary productivity appropriated by humans and compared it to the species richness of vertebrate, invertebrate and plant groups and to landscape diversity index in 560 mapping grid squares with grid size approximately 130 km
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. Spatial correlations and regressions were established between human population density, appropriation of net primary production, land cover and biodiversity. We found positive spatial coincidence between human population density and species richness. Although the amount of net primary production was not related to species richness in general, we found significant negative spatial relationship between ecosystem use intensity and landscape diversity. As the area of the Czech Republic exhibits relatively high land use intensities, spatial patterns of human impacts have important implications for land management and biodiversity conservation in a cultural landscape.
We assessed human impacts on ecosystems by calculating the proportion of aboveground net primary production appropriated by humans (aHANPP) in the territory of the Czech Republic. The human ...appropriation of aboveground net primary production reached 21.5 Tg C per year in 2006 or 56% of the annual potential natural productivity. Harvested productivity equivalent aNPP
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is contributing to the overall appropriation of photosynthetic production by 80%. Considerable productivity losses have been induced by agricultural land conversion and urbanization. While artificial surfaces are responsible for the appropriation of whole ecosystem production, productivity of urban green areas and managed forests can even exceed natural productivity levels. In the period 1990–2000, the aHANPP dropped by 7%, but the indicator shows an increase by over 2% in the period 2000–2006. The indicator of human appropriation of net primary production enables translation of land cover changes into measures of ecosystem services affected by human activities. We found aHANPP to be a suitable indicator of human impacts on ecosystems, as it detects trends and enables spatial mapping of human impacts.
This article is a free continuation of the introductory article CAD and GIS in Microstation Graphical Environment published in the 1/1998 edition. It provides a basic information on the computer ...graphics. Its main part gives a description of technically aimed raster editor Descartes and its use for a scanned geological map transformation into the Microstation environment in the S-JTSK co-ordinate system.
Many of technologies which are nowadays useful for the mankind were developed for the military purpose. One of these technologies is Remote Sensing, which has been aimed to obtain information from ...the hostile territory. Investments to the development of Remote Sensing technologies are now coming back because these systems output data are increasingly used for the monitoring and data analysis in various fields of our life.
The article introduces the CAD and GIS systems and graphical environment MicroStation, as a software base. Some important systems moduls by Benley Corporation and complemen-tary moduls created in MDL ...language at our department are described.
The paper discusses some of the problems of geology and earth resources management in relation to environmental problems of the technosphere. It deals also with some aspects of environmental ...monitoring of areas where surveying or mining operations are planned or in progress.
CURE project addressed the multidimensionality of urban resilience. The project's App06 component demonstrated the utility of InSAR technology in supporting the assessment of geotechnical hazards in ...urban or post-mining environments. Results were obtained for two different areas and hazards with a potentially similar impact mechanism on exposed assets - buildings. Geotechnical risks were assessed for assets in Arkalochori, Crete, impacted by a displacement inflicted by the 2021 earthquake, and in Ostrava-Karvina post-mining landscape subjected to gradual ground displacements resulting from mining activity.
Problém nahromadenia akých kovov v ivotnom prostredí je jedným z najväèích problémov súèastnosti. Najviac akých kovov pochádzajúcich z antropogénnej èinnosti sa hromadí vo vodnom systéme, vïaka tomu ...sa aké kovy dostávajú cez potravinový reazec do ¾udského organizmu, pre ktorý sú vo zvýených koncentráciách toxické. Z h¾adiska toxického pôsobenia na organizmus je dôleité pozna nie len celkové mnostvo kovového prvku, ktoré sa nachádza v recipiente, ale aj v akých formách je prvok viazaný. V práci bola navrhnutá metóda postupnej extrakcie, ktorá rozde¾uje jednotlivé formy kovov do 6 frakcií, èo umoòuje ich stanovenie.
The paper discusses some of the possibilities of managing environmental issues linked with industrial and communal activities, using the support of GIS. At the Dept. of Geology and Mineralogy ...(Numerical geolo-gy section) the first steps has been made to enable a participative monitoring of the state of the environment in the Hornád river valley through a number of projects. (RECENT, Hornád river watching). A number of speciali-zed application software was developed (for the MicroStation environment) that enables the GIS type of data integration. The paper gives the most important results of the monitoring.
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