TY - JOUR A1 - Kuhlmann, Sabine A1 - Wayenberg, Ellen A1 - Bergström, Tomas A1 - Franzke, Jochen T1 - The Essence and Transformation of Local Self-Government in Western Europe JF - The Future of Local Self-Government : European Trends in Autonomy, Innovations and Central-Local Relations N2 - All over Europe, cities and municipalities face new and numerous challenges to uphold their unique self-governing role in society. This intriguing reality underscores this volume’s ambition of brightening the future of local self-government. After further elaborating on this relevant background and the approach taken, the first chapter introduces three main dimensions of analysis. They are key to the volume’s subsequent parts on the essence of local government’s autonomy, its transformations in the light of digitalisation, marketisation and amalgamation and, finally, its changing intergovernmental relations concerning supervision and subnational policy-making. This volume covers eight countries, spread over Europe. And so, this introductory chapter ends with highlighting main features of the different local government systems involved. KW - Local self-government KW - Autonomy KW - Transformation KW - Intergovernmental relations Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-3-030-56059-1 SN - 978-3-030-56058-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56059-1_1 SP - 1 EP - 14 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hellwig, Niels A1 - Walz, Ariane A1 - Markovic, Danijela T1 - Climatic and socioeconomic effects on land cover changes across Europe BT - Does protected area designation matter? JF - PloS One N2 - Land cover change is a dynamic phenomenon driven by synergetic biophysical and socioeconomic effects. It involves massive transitions from natural to less natural habitats and thereby threatens ecosystems and the services they provide. To retain intact ecosystems and reduce land cover change to a minimum of natural transition processes, a dense network of protected areas has been established across Europe. However, even protected areas and in particular the zones around protected areas have been shown to undergo land cover changes. The aim of our study was to compare land cover changes in protected areas, non-protected areas, and 1 km buffer zones around protected areas and analyse their relationship to climatic and socioeconomic factors across Europe between 2000 and 2012 based on earth observation data. We investigated land cover flows describing major change processes: urbanisation, afforestation, deforestation, intensification of agriculture, extensification of agriculture, and formation of water bodies. Based on boosted regression trees, we modelled correlations between land cover flows and climatic and socioeconomic factors. The results show that land cover changes were most frequent in 1 km buffer zones around protected areas (3.0% of all buffer areas affected). Overall, land cover changes within protected areas were less frequent than outside, although they still amounted to 18,800 km2 (1.5% of all protected areas) from 2000 to 2012. In some parts of Europe, urbanisation and intensification of agriculture still accounted for up to 25% of land cover changes within protected areas. Modelling revealed meaningful relationships between land cover changes and a combination of influencing factors. Demographic factors (accessibility to cities and population density) were most important for coarse-scale patterns of land cover changes, whereas fine-scale patterns were most related to longitude (representing the general east/west economic gradient) and latitude (representing the north/south climatic gradient). KW - Species-Diversity KW - Determinants KW - Intensity KW - Patterns KW - Transformation KW - Tree KW - National-Parks KW - Biodiversity KW - Drivers KW - Abandonment Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219374 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 14 IS - 7 PB - PLOS 1 CY - San Francisco ER -