Rapid and periodic assessment of the impact of land cover change and climate variability on ecosystem services at regional levels is essential to understanding services and sustainability of ecosystems. This study focused on quantifying and assessing the changes in multiple ecosystem services in the Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR), China in 2000–2012.

In the Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopian highlands, rainfall distribution is extremely uneven both spatially and temporally. Drought frequently results in crop failure, while high rainfall intensities result in low infiltration and high runoff causing soil erosion and land degradation. These combined factors contribute to low agricultural productivity and high levels of food insecurity. Poor land management practices coupled with lack of effective rainwater management strategies aggravate the situation.

Community assembly rules have been extensively studied, but its association with regional environmental variation and land use history remains largely unexplored. Land use history might be especially important in Mediterranean forests, considering their historical deforestation and recent afforestation.

Climate change is predicted to have widespread impacts on freshwater lake and reservoir nutrient budgets by altering both hypolimnetic hypoxia and runoff, which will in turn alter the magnitude of internal and external nutrient loads. To examine the effects of these potential climate scenarios on nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) budgets, we conducted a whole-catchment manipulation of hypolimnetic oxygen conditions and external loads to Falling Creek Reservoir (FCR), an old, eutrophic reservoir in a reforested catchment with a history of agricultural land use.

The urban heat island effect poses a challenge in several cities, and may affect human and ecosystem health. It was proven that relatively small urban conglomerations in mid-latitudes, such as the case study region of Rostock, have undergone a considerable effect recently, noticeable particularly in the warm season. Due to climatic changes, these effects are expected to alter in intensity and/or frequency. This was investigated using a model that focuses on interactions between land use and surface temperatures and on specific air conditions in cities.

Desertification is one of the main environmental and also social and economic problems facing Iran. Seventeen out of 31 Iranian provinces, which are home to approximately 70% of the total population, are affected by desertification. This study aimed to use geographic information system (GIS) and fuzzy logic for mapping environmentally sensitive areas to desertification based on Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use approach in Isfahan province, central Iran.

Fertilization is one of the most important factors to improve plant characteristics and nutrient uptake. Biological N2 Fixation (BNF) is a process of great importance in crop production systems, to enhance sustainability and prevent land degradation in modern agriculture. The impact of the biofertilizer (NPKB) produced from PK rock biofertilizer mixed with earthworm compound enriched in N by free living diazotrophic bacteria and of the bioprotector (NPKP) with chitosan from Cunninghamella elegans were investigated in a field experiment with melon.

Understanding vegetation dynamics provides information on changes in land cover that can directly be related to regional changes in the climate system. In data-sparse regions, i.e. northwest Morocco studies are limited by the availability of comprehensive information on precipitation.

Temporal variations in land-atmosphere water vapor exchange are more pronounced in seasonal environments, especially grass-dominated savannas (known as campo sujo Cerrado) of the southern and eastern Amazon Basin. Recent work in campo sujo indicates that rates of canopy conductance (gc) were directly and indirectly affected by a variety of meteorological variables, which limited our understanding of how seasonal variation in meteorology affected rates of gc. Thus, our overall objective here is to determine how individual meteorological variables affect seasonal variations in gc.

China has a long history of deforestation and environmental degradation. Because China is also lacking biological reserves, off-reserve conservation is a major contributor to its conservation efforts. Off-reserve conservation in China is primarily being achieved within afforestation and low-intensity agriculture. We compare ant diversity of three habitats: Natural Forest, Disturbed Forest and Plantation, to assess the conservation potential of these multiple land uses.

Human activities have exerted a powerful influence on the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) and drive changes that can be a challenge to predict given the influence of multiple environmental stressors. This study focused on understanding how land management and climate change have together influenced terrestrial N storage and watershed inorganic N export across boreal and sub‐arctic landscapes in northern Sweden.

This review assesses existing data, models, and other knowledge-based methods for valuing the effects of sustainable land management including the cost of land degradation on a global scale. The overall development goal of sustainable human well-being should be to obtain social, ecologic, and economic viability, not merely growth of the market economy. Therefore new and more integrated methods to value sustainable development are needed. There is a huge amount of data and methods currently available to model and analyze land management practices.