Land development
These improvements aim to align with best design practice, political sensitivities, and the inevitable social requirements of a project, with the overarching objective of increasing land values and profit margins on behalf of the landowner or developer.
Land value is highly sensitive to supply and demand (for the end product), build costs, planning and affordable housing contributions, and so on.
Recreation of farmland from wasteland, deserts or previous impervious surfaces is considerably less frequent because of the degraded or missing fertile soil in the latter.
Agricultural development furthermore includes: Because the newly created farmland is more prone to erosion than soil stabilized by tree roots, such a conversion may mean irreversible crossing of an ecological threshold.
This is because plantations of other trees as a means for water conservation and protection against wind erosion (shelterbelts), as a rule, lack the biodiversity of the lost forest, especially when realized as monocultures.
The same is true for planned vegetation like parks and gardens, but restoration plays a particular role, because it reverses previous conversions to built and agricultural areas.
[definition needed] In the United States, federally funded projects typically require preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS).
[citation needed] The extent, and type of land use directly affects wildlife habitat and thereby impacts local and global biodiversity.
[10] Human alteration of landscapes from natural vegetation (e.g. wilderness) to any other use can result in habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, all of which can have devastating effects on biodiversity.
[12] An example of land conversion being a chief cause of the critically endangered status of a carnivore is the reduction in habitat for the African wild dog, Lycaon pictus.
Reforestation is a reactive approach designed to replant trees that were previously logged within the forest boundary in attempts to re-stabilize this ecosystem.
