The recently completed 'Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture' (CA) assessed the benefits, costs and impacts of the past 50 years of water development. It highlighted important trends that frame the challenges in water resources management of today and into the future, and critically evaluated solutions that people have developed to cope with these challenges.

Pastoralism is an ancient form of self-provisioning that is still in wide use today throughout the world. While many pastoral regions are the focus of current desertification studies, the long history of sustainability evidenced by these cultures is of great interest. Numerous studies suggesting a general trend of desertification intimate degradation is a recent phenomenon principally attributable to changes in land tenure, management, and treatment.

Soil and climatic conditions as well as land cover and land management have been shown to strongly impact the structure and diversity of the soil bacterial communities. Here, we addressed under a same land cover the potential effect of the edaphic parameters on the soil bacterial communities, excluding potential confounding factors as climate. To do this, we characterized two natural soil sequences occurring in the Montiers experimental site.

An assessment of the relative importance of vegetation change and disturbance as agents of landscape change under current and future climates would (1) provide insight into the controls of landscape dynamics, (2) help inform the design and development of coarse scale spatially explicit ecosystem models such as Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), and (3) guide future land management and planning. However, quantification of landscape change from vegetation development and disturbance effects is difficult because of the large space and long time scales involved.

Desert wetlands, or ciénegas, are regions of high conservation value in the American Deserts. These environments, in the Apache Highlands Ecoregion spanning the borderlands of Arizona, USA and Sonora, México, contain an estimated 19% of endangered, threatened and candidate species within 2% of the regional area. Besides being crucial refugia for native fish, amphibians, snails, and plants, ciénegas constitute critical habitat for migratory birds. Here we analyze the distribution, conservation status and restoration potential of ciénegas in this region.

Immense land-cover changes in Iceland over the last millennium have encompassed birch (Betula pubescencs) woodland depletion and extensive soil erosion; few studies have focused on spatial distribution change of birch woodland in Iceland over centuries.

This research provides a first example of a practical application of the concept relevant to policy stakeholders, wherein the trade-off between two soil functions – ‘primary productivity’ and ‘carbon cycling and storage’ is assessed. This is measured in response to the intervention of land drainage systems applied to poorly and imperfectly draining managed grasslands in Ireland. This trade-off is examined spatially using integrated mapping within ArcGIS. National level datasets on land use were combined with an indicative drainage map.

Eutrophication of urban surface waters from excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) inputs remains a major issue in water quality management. Although much research has focused on understanding loading of nutrients from storm events, there has been little research to understand the contribution of baseflow, the water moving through storm drains between rainfall events. We investigated the relative contributions of baseflow versus stormflow for loading of water and nutrients (various forms of N and P) by the storm drain network in six urban sub-watersheds in St. Paul, MN, USA.

Quantifying the impacts of climate change on the hydrology and ecosystem is important in the study of the Loess Plateau, China, which is well known for its high erosion rates and ecosystem sensitivity to global change. A distributed ecohydrological model was developed and applied in the Jinghe River basin of the Loess Plateau. This model couples the vegetation model, BIOME BioGeochemicalCycles (BIOME-BGC) and the distributed hydrological model, Water and Energy transfer Process in Large river basins (WEP-L).