Over the past 20 years, water reform has moved to clarify water rights and responsibilities among users, separated water and land management, and introduced markets. Most recently, water policy has clearly recognised the need for environmental allocations to ensure sustainability. These reforms, especially the last, have created conflicts between stakeholder groups.

The pygmy rabbit (Brachylagus idahoensis), the world's smallest rabbit, has a limited distribution due to its year round dependence on sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) for food and shelter. Due to accelerating habitat loss from fragmentation, development, and fire, understanding the pygmy rabbit's ecology has become increasingly important. In 2010, we initiated a study of the status of a pygmy rabbit population and its habitat requirements on U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land near Woodruff in northeastern Utah.

This paper focuses on irrigation schemes under rotational water supply in arid and semiarid regions. It presents a methodology for developing plans for optimum allocation of land area and water, considering performance measures such as productivity, equity and adequacy. These irrigation schemes are characterized by limited water supply and heterogeneity in soils, crops, climate and water distribution network, etc.

Land management causes changes in forest structure and thus influences the composition and abundance of communities of forest-inhabiting bird species. However, it is unclear how these changes translate into local habitat suitability for certain bird species given that detailed knowledge on habitat use by forest bird species is still scarce. We have analyzed the habitat preferences of 37 breeding bird species in 19 lowland beech forests, each with an average size of 40 ha.

SummaryThe recognition that biodiversity conservation requires more than a system of reserves has led to the need to consider the outcomes of land management actions, such as timber harvesting, in the matrix land outside reserves. The design of harvesting systems can be guided by the natural disturbance regime, which in Tasmania's lowland wet eucalypt forests is infrequent, intense wildfire.

Oasification and desertification are basic geographical processes in arid areas, and both change the soil properties and quality. Recently, oasification has been obvious in the southern rim of the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, China, and agriculture is the main land-use type. In 2004, four experimental fields were established in the Cele Oasis, representing four typical land-use types of local farmers' tillage practices during oasification.

Market-based policy instruments are used in the design of land management programs to provide incentives to landholders to generate efficient ecological outcomes on private land. Despite the increased use of economic instruments, many landholders remain unwilling to participate in these programs.

In this article, we provide a synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature and state and federal policies focused on absentee landowners of forestland, rangeland, or farmland in the U.S. The synthesis indicates absentee owners, as compared to those living on the land, appear to be much more likely to live in urban areas, are less dependent financially upon the land and much more likely to own land for amenity reasons than production purposes.

It has been predicted that Europe will experience a rise in temperature of 2.2–5.3 °C within this century. This increase in temperature may lead to vegetation change along altitudinal gradients. To test whether vegetation composition has already changed in the recent decade due to current warming (and other concomitant environmental changes), we recorded plant species composition in 1995 and 2005/2006 in Swiss pre-alpine fen meadows (800–1,400 m a.s.l.).