Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Ghana combine conservation and development objectives and were introduced in the year 2000. In some cases, they have connected collectors of shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) nuts with certified organic world markets, which can be understood as a ‘market-based’ approach to conservation. This paper examines how the benefits of this approach are distributed and argues that shea land formalization is crucial to this process. It makes this argument by drawing on interviews within two communities bordering Mole National Park.

Vegetation influences climate by altering water and energy budgets. With intensifying threats from anthropogenic activities, both terrestrial biomes and climate are expected to change, and the need to understand land–atmosphere interactions will become increasingly crucial. We ran a climate model coupled with a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) to investigate the establishment of terrestrial biomes starting from a bareground scenario and how these biomes influence the climate throughout their evolution.

Soybean is an important natural source of isoflavones, but their concentration is likely to be influenced by external factors, such as climatic conditions and soil tillage systems. However, there is minimal information about the effects of such external factors on the isoflavone concentration in soybeans grown in Europe.

Rock glaciers are common forms of relief of the periglacial belt of many mountain structures in the world. They are potential sources of water in arid and semi-arid regions, and therefore their analysis is important in assessing water reserves. Mountain structures in the north-east of Yakutia have optimal conditions for the formation of rock glaciers, but they have not yet been studied in this regard. In this article, for the first time, we present a detailed list of rock glaciers in this region.

Since China’s reform and development commenced, in the context of rapid urbanization and coordinated regional development, Chinese cities with a close geographic proximity and social ties have gradually formed an integrated city development model. As a new phenomenon in China’s urbanization process, existing research on China’s integrated cities mainly focuses on typical case studies, and most research has been limited to literature reviews and theoretical analyses.

The increasing scale of urbanization and human activities has resulted in the fragmentation of natural habitats, leading to the reduction of ecological landscape connectivity and biodiversity. Taking Nanping as the study area, the core areas with good connectivity were extracted as ecological sources using a morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) and landscape connectivity index. Then the ecosystem service functions of the ecological sources were evaluated based on the InVEST model.

Mediterranean cultural landscapes have been recognized as multifunctional landscapes that are currently threatened by two opposing trends: rural abandonment and agricultural intensification. Uncovering people’s perceptions of different landscape configurations, and how inhabitants value the contributions of nature to human wellbeing, is essential to understanding current landscape trends.

The Chinese project, better known as the Grain for Green Project (GGP), has changed the land-use type in the karst area of Puding county, Guizhou province, southwest China, and this study is aimed at evaluating the Hg distribution and determining factors in soils after the land-use change. A total of ten soil profiles were selected in the typical karst region, and the land-use types were divided into native vegetation land (NVL), farmland (FL), and abandoned farmland (AFL).

In Ethiopia, urban expansion happens at high rates and results in land expropriations often at the cost of agriculture and forests. The process of urban expansion does not include assessment of ecosystem services (ES). This has been causing unintended environmental problems. This study aims to uncover ES of three most important land use types (cropland, agroforestry, and grassland) that are threatened by land expropriation for urban expansion in Bahir Dar City. The study applied a participatory approach using community perception and expert judgments (N = 108).

Roughly 90% of farmers in the Western Cape Province of South Africa have converted to no-tillage systems to improve the efficiency of crop production. Implementation of no-tillage restricts the mixing of soil amendments, such as limestone, into soil. Stratification of nutrients and pH is expected. A soil survey was conducted to determine the extent and geographical spread of acid soils and pH stratification throughout the Western Cape. Soil samples (n = 653) were taken at three depths (0–5, 5–15, 15–30 cm) from no-tillage fields.

The redevelopment and transformation of industrial land has become an important part of urban renewal in China. This study adopts a spatial perspective to investigate the transformation of industrial land in Shenzhen based on a set of reliable data of all urban redevelopment projects of industrial land from 2010 to 2018. Research shows that the development of the real estate market, local government’s strategic demand for upgrading industrial structure, and the policy objective of improving land use intensity are important factors that affect the industrial land transformation.

Piping erosion is one form of water erosion that leads to significant changes in the landscape and environmental degradation. In the present study, we evaluated piping erosion modeling in the Zarandieh watershed of Markazi province in Iran based on random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and Bayesian generalized linear models (Bayesian GLM) machine learning algorithms.