Tigers are an important flagships species. In the past the Assam province of India was known as a wilderness where tigers thrived. Today they exist in only 11 Protected Areas in Assam. Loss of habitat loss, stemming from anthropogenic activities, poaching and related effects have resulted in a declining tiger population in Assam, a part of the Eastern Himalaya global biodiversity hotspot. In this study Ecological Niche Modelling and EcoCrop tools were employed to predict tiger habitat suitability in Assam using the DIVA-GIS software based on present and future climate conditions. Using the Bioclim model, 19 climatic variables were used to model climatic conditions. The predictions indicate slight differences in the tiger habitat suitability between the two climates. The EcoCrop function was employed using two plant species as surrogate indicators to derive an indirect estimation of how tiger habitat distribution in the future could result.

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Phoenix is the fastest growing large (> 2 million residents) metropolitan area in the USA, having gained nearly 800,000 new residents between 2000 and 2006. This desert metropolis is projected to grow to almost nine million residents in 2050, raising the specter of an urban region on the scale of Chicago or Los Angeles in the midst of the Sonoran Desert. A critical question facing decision makers in Phoenix is whether the region has enough water to sustain this growth. This question is particularly pertinent because there is growing agreement among climate models that the Southwestern USA will be warmer and drier during the 21st Century with predictable reductions in the river flows that supply Phoenix’s surface water.

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Although overshadowed by Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, which has become the "place image" of the Black Hills, Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument comprise two important national treasures set within the regional milieu of the Black Hills. These caves serve as prime examples of how very weak geomorphic processes associated with solution weathering can become dominant and render a vast and complicated subterranean landscape in an environment insulated completely from sunlight, rain, wind erosion, freezing/thawing, flowing water and bioturbation. Indeed, other than a few colonies of bats near the cave entrances, both caves are essentially devoid of life.

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Alaska’s Glacier Bay is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. Since George Vancouver’s initial charting of an ice-chocked coastal indentation in 1794, the ice has receded over 160 km, creating an elegant fiord system. The retreat and subsequent biotic succession is well documented by scientific luminaries such as John Muir, John Burroughs, W.O. Fields, and William Cooper. This paper examines four significant environmental and cultural changes in Glacier Bay from 1984 to 2005. These include the grounding of Muir Glacier and its effect on marine life, the impact of isostatic rebound in Adams Inlet, the return of sea otters, and the advent of supranational land protection designations and increasing visitation.

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Over the past decade and a half, the government of Ukraine implemented policies to restructure agricultural collectives and privatize agricultural land, transferring formal ownership of a landmass as large as Germany from state to private hands. However, this legal transformation did not create useable property rights for ordinary people in rural areas. Instead, after more than a decade of uncertainty, price scissors, and other challenges to profitable agriculture, farming in much of Ukraine is now characterized by two tendencies: villagers’ dependence on household garden plots, which exist in a symbiotic relationship with large-scale commercial agricultural production; and unstable managerial cadres on some former agricultural collectives, as businessmen lease land for a year at a time, growing soil-depleting cash crops such as sunflower.

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Rituals and places - also from a geographer’s perspective - astonishingly few publications have been written on the connection between place and ritual. This is surprising because of two reasons: on the one hand because action based constructions of places are seen as a fundamental element of human geography; on the other hand because geography sees itself as a science in which "place" is a central interest of knowledge and ought to be studied accordingly. By taking commemorative ceremonies of the Allied landings in Normandy as an empirical example, the paper tries to narrow this research gap and discusses the questions how rituals create different places, what kind of places are constructed and why commemorating the war is still useful for today’s societies so many years after the event.

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In the northeast of central Beijing, the so-called 798 Art District has developed into the most famous cluster of "independent" art in China. This cluster is a highly symbolic phenomenon, which deserves attention also from the geographic point of view. Grown on the site of a huge former state-owned factory complex of the 1950s, it reflects industrialisation and tertiarisation, mega urbanisation, globalisation, political opening-up and commercialisation in contemporary China - to name just some of the most important urban and social developments.

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