Policies and strategies for tree management and protection on a national, regional, and local level have not sufficiently considered differences between rural and urban areas. We used expert knowledge to compare rural and urban areas in a case study evaluating the relative importance of ecosystem services (ES) in policy development. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and focus group discussions were used to rank 17 ES, representing...

Water and wastewater management, especially in rural areas, greatly affects loads of nutrients discharged to the Baltic Sea. In Poland, this management is unbalanced because of the dispersed development and in many locations construction of sewerage system is uneconomic or even impossible. For this reason, a significant part of sewage from single-family houses in rural areas must be discharged into domestic sewage systems. The...

In the rural areas building of sewerage systems and central wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) often brings too high costs, due to high distances from one farm to another and terrain configuration. Individual treatment systems for each farm are a good solution. The teratment wetlands for nine individual farms were constructed in Kaszubian Lake District in summer and autumn 2009. Three configurations of reed beds were chosen. In...