Land is essential to livelihoods, so it is hard to overstate its strategic significance for well-being and prosperity. It has been detected that farm size greatly influences agricultural sustainability from the viewpoints of the economy, environment, and society. Land concentration is negatively affecting the development of rural communities.
Afforestation of former agricultural lands is a common practice in several countries. This is beneficial for avoiding diseases carry-over from previous forest generations and to expand forest areas. However, several biotic and abiotic risks have been reported in such stands, including a higher risk of Heterobasidion root rot after thinning.
Estonian and Latvian rural inhabitants enjoy many factors enhancing the quality of life, such as the peace and quiet of the countryside, fresh food and rural activities. However, these benefits are insufficient to overcome poor employment prospects in rural areas. Place-shaping practices have transformative powers that are instrumental in achieving sustainable change in communities.
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment framework to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/frameworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments.
Land is one of the most important natural resources; its use is determined by several factors, especially resources and infrastructure. Without proper land management and maintenance as well as after abandoning the land favourable conditions arise for land degradation. Land degradation processes are also found in road infrastructure, which are promoted by various risk factors.
Land consolidation and land exchange are two important measures that can be used to improve the spatial structure of farm holdings. Unfortunately, land cannot be consolidated and exchanged in all villages of a given area simultaneously, due to economic, technical, and social considerations.
The article presents an analysis of the existing situation of forests of the Republic of Lithuania. The situation is analysed in ten counties of the country. In the Republic of Lithuania, forests occupied 2,178,958.04 ha, country’s forest coverage – 33.38% in 2017. The highest forest coverage was established in Alytus (48.80%) and Vilnius (43.47%) counties.
Soil quality is one of the most important factors determining the potential for obtaining a high profit from farming. The agricultural quality of soils is described by soil quality classes, and the suitability of soils for growing particular plants or plant communities is described in terms of soil-agricultural complexes.
There are many methods to estimate wild ungulate populations. One of these is represented by observations from vantage points usually employed in medium-low covered forest areas to estimate cervids. This method is subject to some limitations, such as the risk of double counting and the necessity to a high number of operators due to the small size of the observable areas.
The territorial planning and the management of urban surfaces force the decrease of green spaces in urban landscapes. As the urbanization process during past decades of the last century was quite intensive not only in Europe but also in Lithuania, findings describing changes of forest cover as well as spatial structure of the forest land are requested.