Projects
Greening intensive farming landscapes: evaluating land use strategies in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning and their tradeoffs with production and farmer income KU Leuven
Throughout history, European landscapes have been strongly influenced by farming practices. As a result, extensively managed farming landscapes provided a habitat to many species and nowadays, semi-natural habitats form the focus of nature conservation in Europe. During the past century, these farming landscapes became increasingly intensified, increasing food production levels throughout the region. However, the intensification of ...
Community, Control and Commons. Access to Land, Use Rights and Social Power Relations in the Belgian Ardennes between 1750 and 1900 Ghent University
This research project aims to reassess historiographical debates on shifting power relations in rural
communities during the transition period 1750-1900, when village communities were gradually
incorporated into modern society in Western Europe. The ambition of this project is to approach
these shifts by analysing social property relations, which appear at the heart of power struggles
between and among local actors, ...
The power of imaginaries in urban and peri-urban planning conflicts: a postcolonial and comparative perspective on informal land use and services in Bogota, Lima and La Paz Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Medieval urban agricultural land use in Flanders and Brabant (6th-13th centuries AD): phytolith research as a novel tool for the understanding of cultivated soils in towns Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Flanders and Brabant. The overarching goal is to answer longstanding questions on the role and practice of agriculture in medieval
town development. On the one hand, the project aims to investigate
the cultivated crops on urban medieval fieldson one hand, and soil
intensification processes on the other. In addition, the spatial
evolution of these ...
Payments for Ecosystem Services and land use dynamics: motivational and institutional interactions - case studies from rural Nicaragua. University of Antwerp
Food economy and land use during the Late Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman period (1600 BC-400 AD) in Southeast Bulgaria: bioarcheological perspectives KU Leuven
Ancient Thrace was an extensive area that occupied part of south-eastern Europe (mainly modern Bulgaria and Romania) and played a key role as a bridge between Classical Civilisations and the temperate ‘Barbarian’ Europe, becoming a unique interacting world between East and West. It was not an ethnically and culturally homogenous region, but was rather composed of numerous tribes that shared a common material culture. Thracian peoples are ...
Exploring Russion Agriculture's Potential for Food Production, Rural Development, Climate Mitigation and Adaptation: The Role of Land Use Changes, Technological Upgrading and Policies (ERA-FDC-Policies) KU Leuven
Widespread areas of abandoned agricultural lands are located in Russia. However, it remains largely unstudied whether abandoned lands should be recultivated to ensure stable food supply, particularly considering projections of increasing climatic ensitivity of the southern breadbasket regions in Russia. Little is also known about the potential of regions with large abandoned land areas to sequester carbon (C) in agriculture and in this way ...
Productivity and genetic diversity of Wild coffee (Coffea arabica) in its center of origin, southern Ethiopia, in relation to forest management and land use. KU Leuven
Deep Learning in the Built Environment for Large-Scale Mapping and Detailed Land Use KU Leuven
Highly detailed, large-scale land-use monitoring so far in Belgium has been absent. Lots of data is available such as satellite and aerial imagery but also point cloud data from LiDAR. However, the handling of that data is either a manual interpretation task or a heavily supervised machine-learning method is used. The manual labeling of training data for machine-learning networks is a common approach, but highly intensive and costly. ...