Twenty years ago I completed my Master’s work in the Chaco forests of northern Argentina. The native forests are, in fact, rangelands. In addition to livestock grazing, there is timber extraction, wildlife harvest (think tegu lizard cowboy boots), and charcoal production. I took part in a project comparing biodiversity among production systems. A new system promised to reverse biodiversity loss and soil degradation. But it’s a moot point now since much of that forest has been cleared for cropland—the highest rate of tropical forest loss in the world.

The Rocky Mountains of the western United States contain many economically important natural resources. Increasing development of these resources has lead to land degradation, which often requires restoration efforts. A common type of disturbance in this region is mineral extraction and these activities often occur in zones of vegetation dominated by shrubs. These mined lands have proven to be particularly challenging to restore to native shrub cover.

The island of Sri Lanka is free from serious natural hazards such as volcanic activity and earthquakes resulting from climatic extremes, but there are impacts of many natural disasters, such as landslides, floods and droughts, the intensity and frequency of which are increasing due to human interventions. Some areas of Sri Lanka are also periodically subject to cyclones that occur due to climatic conditions and geographical locations.Land degradation denotes all natural or anthropogenic processes that diminish or impair productivity of land.

Developing sustainable grazing management systems based on perennial species is critical to preventing land degradation in marginal land classes. A field study was conducted from 2002 to 2006 to identify the impacts of deferred grazing (no defoliation of pastures for a period generally from spring to autumn) and fertilizer application on herbage accumulation, soil seed reserve and nutritive value in a hill pasture in western Victoria, Australia.

Reduced tillage is said to be one of the potential ways to reverse land degradation and ultimately increase the productivity of degrading soils of Africa. We hypothesised that crop yield following a modest application of 2 t ha⁻¹ of crop residue in a reduced tillage system is similar to the yield obtained from a conventional tillage system, and that incorporation of legumes in a cropping system leads to greater economic benefits as opposed to a cropping system involving continuous maize.

QUESTION: The decline and loss of perennial vegetation in dryland ecosystems due to global change pressures can alter ecosystem properties and initiate land degradation processes. We tracked changes of perennial vegetation using remote sensing to address the question of how prolonged drought and land‐use intensification have affected perennial vegetation cover across a desert region in the early 21st century? LOCATION: Mojave Desert, southeastern California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, USA.

A multi-disciplinary research with integration of the theory and methods of climatic change and history was carried out in the southern Loess Plateau of China. High-resolution soil-sedimentary data define an abruptly increased climatic aridity at 3100 a B.P. on the southern Loess Plateau. It was caused by a shift from the dominance of the maritime monsoon to the continental monsoon in the East Asia. The marked aridity induced a considerable deterioration of environment and degradation of land resources.

Land degradation is always with us but its causes, extent and severity are contested. We define land degradation as a long-term decline in ecosystem function and productivity, which may be assessed using long-term, remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data. Deviation from the norm may serve as a proxy assessment of land degradation and improvement - if other factors that may be responsible are taken into account. These other factors include rainfall effects which may be assessed by rain-use efficiency, calculated from NDVI and rainfall.

Soil erosion is by far the greatest cause of land degradation and other environmental and socio‐economic problems in China. Although various conservation methods are widely utilized to reduce soil erosion and to sustain agricultural production, the cost‐effectiveness and selection of these methods are less known. Using our survey and ecological data, this study evaluated four soil and water conservation methods in Changting County, Southeast China. The results show that the disparity of conservation costs is much larger than that of ecological benefits.

This paper investigates empirically the effect of land invasions on farm production decisions. The main hypothesis is that more invasions in a region are associated with lower investment, and in particular a bias towards annual crops as opposed to long‐term crops. We use a county‐level dataset for the state of Paraná, Brazil, from 2003 to 2007, with 1,995 observations. The panel data structure allows us to control for fixed effects, such as the formalisation of land titles and land concentration, which might be correlated with the intensity of invasions.

Economic motivation for implementing targeted responses to rangeland degradation often lag the events that cause degradation and existing monitoring schemes often lack the sensitivity or the connections to ecological processes to reliably serve as a basis for evaluating success. In this paper, we present an approach for quantifying the relationship of economic output and land degradation during the intermediate stages of degradation. We also propose an approach that can provide enhanced incentives to implement proven responses before degradation processes are entrained.