Functional urban areas (FUA) have became an important component of polycentric settlement structure of all European countries. FUAs have been defined as labour market basins, composed on large city and its surrounding areas (commuting zones). The very spatial and economic concept formed the foundation of old industrial regions. Old industrialized regions with all the spatial challenges and economic problems could be also perceived as a specific type of functional urban area. In Poland, National Spatial Development Concept 2030 (NSDC 2030 2013) describes restructuring and revitalization of degraded areas and cities in terms of spatial policy measures addressed to the supporting of cohesion in problematic areas. That is why integrated revitalization programs of functional urban areas may become key instrument of regional spatial policy and urban strategies. In response to the problems of degraded land and related land-use conflicts, it can significantly help in establishing valuable solutions, as well as ensuring connections between environmental, social and economic needs in the development of functional urban areas.

The irrigation system control is identified as a complex hierarchical process of stochastic nature, at the head of which the uncertainties, caused by random variations of meteorological factors (climate) and diversion capacity regime from irrigation canals, were laid.

Under such conditions application of the determinate methods for irrigation system control regarding the effectiveness surrenders to the formalistic and empirical methods.

The most appropriate method is the developed by us, method of preventive control.

As a result of retrospective analysis, to each system status, for example, diversion capacity, it is fixed the factors which lead to its changes, for example, rain layer or total evaporation. To every consequence “factor – system status” it is fixed the indicator and it is determined the probability of its exceeding in retrospective series.

The control is in following of such indicator dynamics, forecasting of the most probably changes within system status and adjustment of the water delivery regime to canal reaches with diversion capacity regime from irrigation canals by means of standard preventive graphical chats of water flow control within hydraulic structures and pumping stations.

Use of such control method allows to minimize the uncertainty influence, also it does not require the major modifications in the design and engineering infrastructure.

As an exception can be the measures, directed to the increase of self-regulating qualities of irrigation systems, namely the ability of on-line water volume control, which is regulated in the idle capacities, provided in canal beds or special reservoirs.

The example of such decision in practice is the Kakhovskaya irrigation system in the South of Ukraine. The use factor of water resources on this system reaches 0.85, the technological discharge water does not exceed 7%, the deficit of productive moisture reserve in soil at the end of interirrigation period does not exceed 20% and all these data were obtained under adverse weather conditions.

The development of linear infrastructure increases the degree of fragmentation of natural areas and has a negative impact on biodiversity and the range of available ecosystem services. The basic competing land use model is expanded to include infrastructure development. The extended model leads to the conclusion that due to the dual impact of the infrastructure (lowering the value of ecosystem services and increasing the private rents to developed land), the size of the natural area in the long-term equilibrium will be lower compared to the basic model. The preservation of nature ceases to be profitable enough. Infrastructure also reduces the marginal costs of conversion and thus increasing the volume of natural land being converted at avery moment along the transition path. If the decisions on optimal management of natural areas and infrastructure development are undertaken together, the result is a lower density of the infrastructure network and a larger ecosystem area in the steady state.

Land cover change (LCC) is important to assess the land use/land cover changes with respect to the development activities like irrigation. The region selected for the study is Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme (VHS) occupying an area of approximately 36, 325 hectares of irrigated land. The study was carried out using Land sat data of 1991, 2001, 2005 covering the area to assess the changes in land use/land cover for which supervised classification technique has been applied. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) index was also done to assess vegetative change conditions during the period of investigation. By using the remote sensing images and with the support of GIS the spatial pattern of land use change of Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme for 15 years was extracted and interpreted for the changes of scheme. Results showed that the spatial difference of land use change was obvious. The analysis reveals that 37.86% of additional land area has been brought under fallow land and thus less irrigation area (18.21%). There is an urgent need for management program to control the loss of irrigation land and therefore reclaim the damaged land in order to make the scheme more viable.

The paper is focused on the research of ecotoxicological properties of mortar prisms produced with partial cement replacement by ash from energy recovery of municipal waste. Two types of ash were used: ash from incineration and ash from municipal waste gasifi cation. According to the Waste Catalogue, ash is considered other waste, which is non-hazardous and nowadays it is predominantly landfi lled. Negative results of standardized biotests are inevitable precondition for the use of ash for construction products. The results from both biotests (acute toxicity test on aquatic organisms Daphnia magna and growth inhibition test of higher cultivated plants Sinapis alba) confi rmed suitability of cement replacement by ash from energy recovery of municipal waste. Environmental safety of produced mortar prisms is different. Recommended replacement of cement with ash, obtained from municipal waste gasifi cation, is 10% and with ash gained from incineration is 15%. The use of this type of waste in construction industry will lead to the decrease of landfi lled waste. Due to the replacement of cement with waste (from industrial branches) natural resources of raw materials used in the process of cement production are saved.

The objective of the article is to examine the approximative and adjustive uses of the verb dire, which is mostly regarded as an assertive and eventful verb; hence nonapproximative. Meanwhile, in many expressions, in an impersonal use, in negation when the subjunctive mode is used, in the conditional forms, its evidence value is weakened and the verb dire can express approximation. The study is situated in light of the enunciation theory, notably it refers to a notion of modalisation. The corpus was established on the basis of dictionaries, which are representative for normative uses, but we will refer as well to press texts, particularly interviews, where the verb say is frequently used as a marker of the position of the speaker.

This article examines the connection between media use and social in/security from the perspective of Finnish Russian-speakers. Based on 25 interviews conducted in Finland in 2015–2016, it analyses the ways in which people in conflict situations mitigate social risks and attempt to produce security by governing their use of the media. Drawing from von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann’s work on social security, the article argues that security studies ought to include transnational media use in their scope and broaden the emphasis towards the social and societal aspects of threat and insecurity. Furthermore, it explains how, in times of conflict, transnational media may turn into a digitalised ‘war zone’ with alarming consequences on the identification and social security of their audiences.

This paper presents results of object-oriented classification of Landsat ETM+ satellite im-age conducted using eCognition software. The classified image was acquired on 7 May 2000. In this particular study, an area of 423 km2 within the borders of Legionowo Community near Warsaw is considered.

Prior to classification, segmentation of the Landsat ETM+ image is performed using panchro-matic channel, fused multispectral and panchromatic data. The applied methods of classification en-abled the identification of 18 land cover and land use classes. After the classification, generalization and raster to vector conversion, verification and accuracy assessment are performed by means of vis-ual interpretation. Overall accuracy of the classification reached 94.6%. The verification and classifi-cation results are combined to form the final database.

This is followed by comparing the object-oriented with traditional pixel-based classification. The latter is performed using the so-called hybrid classification based on both supervised and unsuper-vised classification approaches. The traditional pixel-based approach identified only 8 classes. Com-parison of the pixel-based classification with the database obtained using the object-oriented ap-proach revealed that the former reached 72% and 61% accuracy, according to the applied method.

Climate, land use, and land cover change can propagate alteration to the watershed environment. The interaction be-tween natural and human activities probably accelerates the change, a phenomenon that will generate serious environmental problems. This study aims to evaluate the change in the hydrological regime due to natural and human-induced processes. The study was conducted in Brantas watershed, Indonesia, which is the largest watershed in East Java. This area is populat-ed by more than 8 million inhabitants and is the most urbanized area in the region. An analysis of rainfall time series use to shows the change in natural phenomena. Two land-use maps at different time intervals were used to compare the rapid de-velopment of urbanization, and the discharge from two outlets of the sub-watersheds was employed to assess hydrological changes. The indicator of hydrological alteration (IHA) method was used to perform the analysis. The daily discharge data are from 1996 to 2017. The research results show an increase in flow (monthly, 1-day, 3-day, 7-day, 30-day, and 90-day flows) in the two sub-watersheds (Ploso and Kertosono) from the pre-period (1996–2006) to the post-period (2007–2017).

The development and urban planning affects the general spatial order. Continuously increasing chaos is caused, among other thing, by granting construction permit based on Zoning and Land Use decision. It’s one of the reason why communes do not pass Area Development Plans. Presented research determines the exact reasons this phenomenon. The article also analyses, based on case studies, the unlawful, unsupervised adoption of Zoning and Land Use decisions.