Intensive overgrazing, practiced for the last decades in Inner Mongolia, has led to serious grassland degradation and deterioration of soil structure. As a consequence, the soil gas and water fluxes and therefore soil functions were affected by grazing. We investigated two steppe ecosystems characterized by two plant communities: Stipa grandis (SG) and Leymus chinensis (LCh) and different grazing intensities: ungrazed since 1979 (UG79), continuously grazed (CG, at the SG site) and winter grazed (WG, at the LCh site).

Leymus chinensis is a dominant grass species in the Inner Mongolia steppes owing to its high vegetative productivity, good palatability for cattle, and abundant horizontally creeping rhizomes. Drought is generally regarded as one of the main environmental issues that is becoming a daunting challenge to the growth of plants, and ultimately results in land degradation.

Post-fire land degradation is often attributed to fire-induced soil water repellency, despite the fact that soil water repellency is a natural phenomenon in many soils and is therefore not necessarily caused by fire. To improve our understanding of the role of soil water repellency in causing fire-induced land degradation, a long-term monitoring study was performed in which the temporal variation of topsoil water repellency (0–2.5-cm depth) was captured in a Portuguese shrubland before and after fire between November 2007 and March 2010.

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.

The spatial and temporal dynamics of tropical forest functioning are poorly understood, partly attributed to a weak seasonality and high tree species diversity at the landscape scale. Recent neotropical rainforest studies with local tower flux measurements have revealed strong seasonal carbon fluxes that follow the availability of sunlight in intact forests, while in areas of forest disturbance, carbon fluxes more closely tracked seasonal water availability.

Natural, as well as human-induced, landscape changes may have profound effects on soil-loss rates in Mediterranean countries. Knowledge of the spatial and temporal distribution of the erosion processes from 1984 to 2013 across the fire-prone island of Thassos was gained on the basis of a joint analysis of imagery received from three generations of Landsat satellites. Soil loss was modeled using the revised universal soil loss equation.

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.

Soils with andic features are known to be very important as regards both ecosystem fertility and susceptibility to land degradation. In recent years there has been an increasing number of finds of these soils in non-volcanic mountain ecosystems (NVME) in different parts of the world under different environmental settings. In Italian NVME there has been extensive investigation proving that these soils have a much wider distribution than previously thought. But despite these important findings, very little is known about their genesis or properties.

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.

Driven principally by government regulation and societal expectations, mining companies around the world are seeking to mitigate the environmental impacts of mining through mined land rehabilitation programs. The ultimate goal of rehabilitation is to establish an acceptable and sustainable post-mining land use. Mining companies worldwide face the challenge of specifying just what a sustainable post-mining land use will be.

Gully erosion is a worldwide matter of concern because of the irreversible losses of fertile land, which often have severe environmental, economic and social consequences. While most of the studies on the gullying process have investigated the involved mechanisms (either overland flow incision, seepage or piping erosion), only few have been conducted on the controlling factors of gully wall retreat, an important, if not the dominant, land degradation process and sediment source in river systems.