The effects of agricultural practices on runoff water quality are a major concern worldwide, particularly where there is the potential to cause harm to aquatic ecosystems receiving the runoff. Cropping land has been identified as a major source of pollutants in the Fitzroy Basin, the largest catchment discharging into the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) lagoon. However, knowledge of pollutant generation rates in runoff from the dryland cropping (grains) industry's best management practices (BMPs) on Vertisol soils is limited, partly due to the scarce distribution of these soils worldwide.

Concerns about excessive sediment loads entering the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) lagoon in Australia have led to a focus on improving ground cover in grazing lands. Ground cover has been identified as an important factor in reducing sediment loads, but improving ground cover has been difficult for reef stakeholders in major catchments of the GBR. To provide better information an optimising linear programming model based on paddock scale information in conjunction with land type mapping was developed for the Fitzroy, the largest of the GBR catchments.

Despite their importance to rural livelihoods, the economic and environmental sustainability of contemporary communal pastoral systems of the Kalahari is increasingly being put under scrutiny. Using data collected from a survey of randomly selected pastoral households from two districts of Ghanzi and Kgalagadi South, Botswana, this paper outlines the major constraints affecting contemporary extensive pastoral systems. Because of the prevailing semi-arid climate, recurrent drought outbreaks were cited as a common challenge in both study areas together with lack of fenced grazing areas.

The planning and management of urban forest has become increasingly important as a focus of urban environmental management. The objectives of this study were to analyze the landuse/land cover and to map functional zones of the urban forest in the upper catchment area of Addis Ababa. This study identifies five landuse/land cover types: (i) Eucalyptus–Juniperus dominated forest, (ii) mixed native forest, (iii) built-up areas, (iv) Eucalyptus plantation (v) crop/grazing lands.

The aim of this study was to develop partial least squares (PLS) models to predict the concentrations of 45 elements in soils extracted by the aqua regia (AR) method using diffuse reflectance Fourier Transform mid-infrared (MIR; 4000–500cm⁻¹) spectroscopy. A total of 4130 soils from the GEMAS European soil sampling program (geochemical mapping of agricultural soils and grazing land of Europe) were selected. From the full soil set, 1000 samples were randomly selected to develop PLS models. Cross-validation was used for model training and the remaining 3130 samples used for model testing.

In this paper the use of fenced grazing camps to manage the rangeland commons is challenged. A historical perspective is presented on fencing and rotational grazing in South Africa. Two case studies in KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape illustrate the factors that influence the management of rangelands under communal land tenure without the use of fences. It is argued that herding is preferred over fencing.

This paper aims to contribute to the debates on communal rangelands and analyses the gendered dimension of land rights and land access in the rural areas of Namaqualand. The actual gender relations within rural communities and the emergence of strategies that are being pursued in communal land processes are obscured and often ignored in policies about communal rangelands, which overemphasise ‘the ecological and economic impact’ and the balancing of these dimensions.

Assessing the health of rangeland ecosystems based solely on annual biomass production does not fully describe the condition of the plant community; the phenology of production can provide inferences about species composition, successional stage, and grazing impacts. We evaluated the productivity and phenology of western South Dakota mixed-grass prairie in the period from 2000 to 2008 using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The NDVI is based on 250-m spatial resolution Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery.

The grassland biome of South Africa is a major resource for livestock farming; yet the soils of these rangelands are stressed differently by various management systems. The aim of this study was to investigate how basic soil properties respond to different management systems. For this purpose we sampled rangeland management systems under communal (continuous grazing), commercial (rotational grazing) and land reform (mixture of grazing systems) farming.

Although the literature is full of references to soil degradation under forest cultivation, very little information is available on changes in soil properties following deforestation of the Hyrcanian area in northern Iran. Also, the literature provides little information on the effects of conversion from deforested cropland to grazing, a likely direction of land-use change in northern Iran. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of conversion of native forests into farmlands and/or grazing lands on soil properties and nutrients in the Hyrcanian forest.

Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes. One example is of the high-altitude trans-Himalayan rangelands of the Jammu and Kashmir State in northern India: major socio-political reorganisation over the last five decades has significantly impacted the traditional pasture use pattern and resources.

This paper introduces a generic assessment method called pluri-energy analysis. It aims to assess the types of energy used in agricultural systems and their conversion efficiencies. Four types of energy are considered: fossil energy, gross energy contained in the biomass, energy from human and animal labor and solar energy. The method was applied to compare smallholder low-input dairy-production systems, which are common in developing countries, to the high-input systems encountered in OECD countries.