Journal Articles

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Expansion of Lifestyle Blocks in Peri-Urban New Zealand: A Review of the Implications for Environmental Management and Landscape Design
(MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2025-07-11) Xie H; Pearson D; McLaren SJ; Horne D
Lifestyle blocks (LBs) are small rural holdings primarily used for residential and recreational purposes rather than commercial farming. Despite the rapid expansion of LBs over the last 25 years, which has been driven by lifestyle amenity preference and land subdivision incentives, their environmental performance remains understudied. This is the case even though their proliferation is leading to an irreversible loss of highly productive soils and accelerating land fragmentation in peri-urban areas. Through undertaking a systematic literature review of relevant studies on LBs in New Zealand and comparable international contexts, this paper aims to quantify existing knowledge and suggest future research needs and management strategies. It focuses on the environmental implications of LB activities in relation to water consumption, food production, energy use, and biodiversity protection. The results indicate that variation in land use practices and environmental awareness among LB owners leads to differing environmental outcomes. LBs offer opportunities for biodiversity conservation and small-scale food production through sustainable practices, while also presenting environmental challenges related to resource consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and loss of productive land for commercial agriculture. Targeted landscape design could help mitigate the environmental pressures associated with these properties while enhancing their potential to deliver ecological and sustainability benefits. The review highlights the need for further evaluation of the environmental sustainability of LBs and emphasises the importance of property design and adaptable planning policies and strategies that balance environmental sustainability, land productivity, and lifestyle owners’ aspirations. It underscores the potential for LBs to contribute positively to environmental management while addressing associated challenges, providing valuable insights for ecological conservation and sustainable land use planning.
Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence
(John Wiley and Sons, Inc on behalf of the American Geophysical Union, 2025-06-01) Rulli MC; D’Odorico P; Galli N; John RS; Muylaert RL; Santini M; Hayman DTS
Major infectious diseases threatening human health are transmitted to people from animals or by arthropod vectors such as insects. In recent decades, disease outbreaks have become more common, especially in tropical regions, including new and emerging infections that were previously undetected or unknown. Even though there is growing awareness that altering natural habitats can lead to disease outbreaks, the link between land use change and emerging diseases is still often overlooked and poorly understood. Land use change typically destroys natural habitat and alters landscape composition and configuration, thus altering wildlife population dynamics, including those of pathogen hosts, domesticated (often intermediary) hosts, infectious agents, and their vectors. Moreover, land use changes provide opportunities for human exposure to direct contact with wildlife, livestock, and disease-carrying vectors, thereby increasing pathogen spillover from animals to humans. Here we explore the nexus between human health and land use change, highlighting multiple pathways linking emerging disease outbreaks and deforestation, forest fragmentation, urbanization, agricultural expansion, intensified farming systems, and concentrated livestock production. We connect direct and underlying drivers of land use change to human health outcomes related to infectious disease emergence. Despite growing evidence of land-use induced spillover, strategies to reduce the risks of emerging diseases are often absent from discussions on sustainable food systems and land management. A “One Health” perspective—integrating human, animal, and environmental health—provides a critical yet often-overlooked dimension for understanding the health impacts of land use change.
Modelling Lassa virus dynamics in West African Mastomys natalensis and the impact of human activities.
(The Royal Society, 2024-07-24) John RS; Fatoyinbo HO; Hayman DTS
Lassa fever is a West African rodent-borne viral haemorrhagic fever that kills thousands of people a year, with 100 000 to 300 000 people a year probably infected by Lassa virus (LASV). The main reservoir of LASV is the Natal multimammate mouse, Mastomys natalensis. There is reported asynchrony between peak infection in the rodent population and peak Lassa fever risk among people, probably owing to differing seasonal contact rates. Here, we developed a susceptible-infected-recovered ([Formula: see text])-based model of LASV dynamics in its rodent host, M. natalensis, with a persistently infected class and seasonal birthing to test the impact of changes to seasonal birthing in the future owing to climate and land use change. Our simulations suggest shifting rodent birthing timing and synchrony will alter the peak of viral prevalence, changing risk to people, with viral dynamics mainly stable in adults and varying in the young, but with more infected individuals. We calculate the time-average basic reproductive number, [Formula: see text], for this infectious disease system with periodic changes to population sizes owing to birthing using a time-average method and with a sensitivity analysis show four key parameters: carrying capacity, adult mortality, the transmission parameter among adults and additional disease-induced mortality impact the maintenance of LASV in M. natalensis most, with carrying capacity and adult mortality potentially changeable owing to human activities and interventions.

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