Soil and water conservation measures including terracing, afforestation, construction of sediment‐trapping dams, and the ‘Grain for Green Program’ have been extensively implemented in the Yanhe River watershed, of the Loess Plateau, China, over the last six decades, and have resulted in large‐scale land use and land cover changes. This study examined the trends and shifts in streamflow regime over the period of 1953–2010 and relates them to changes in land use and soil and water conservation and to the climatic factors of precipitation and air temperature.

Crop and land management practices affect both the quality and quantity of soil organic matter (SOM) and hence are driving forces for soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration. The objective of this study was to assess the long‐term effects of tillage, fertilizer application and crop rotation on SOC in an agricultural area of southern Norway, where a soil fertility and crop rotation experiment was initiated in 1953 and a second experiment on tillage practices was initiated in 1983.

Groundwater extraction is one of the most important criteria of land degradation especially land subsidence in arid and semi-arid areas. Understanding the relationship between water extraction and recharge of groundwater can lead to better watershed management. For the estimation of groundwater recharge in Razan-Ghahavand watershed in Central Iran the Soil and Water Assessment Tools was used.

Knowledge of soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics following deforestation or reforestation is essential for evaluating carbon (C) budgets and cycle at regional or global scales. Worldwide land‐use changes involving conversion of vegetation with different photosynthetic pathways (e.g. C₃ and C₄) offer a unique opportunity to quantify SOM decomposition rate and its response to climatic conditions using stable isotope techniques.

Botanical capacity plays a fundamental role in solving the grand challenges of the next century, including climate change, sustainability, food security, preservation of ecosystem services, conservation of threatened species, and control of invasive species. Yet critical components of botanical education, research, and management are lacking across government, academic, and private sectors.

Policy-makers consider participatory reforestation and forest resource management to be the key to reducing the problems of deforestation and forest degradation. In this regard, the government of Ghana introduced a modified taungya system as a mechanism to restore degraded forest reserves under the National Forest Plantation Development Programme to allow landless farmers access to land for temporary crop production and secured tree tenure rights.

After the downfall of the socialist economic system in 1990, Albania underwent an agriculture reform in 1992. After the reform execution, all agricultural land was redistributed among village residents. The subsequent land segmentation lead to extreme agriculture production implications.Gjocaj Commune is located in the centre of Albania at the Peqin District part of the Elbasan Region, which is a typical agricultural area, very close to Tirana and not far from the Adriatic seashore.

Hainan, the largest tropical island in China, belongs to the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. The Changhua watershed is a center of endemism for plants and birds and the cradle of Hainan’s main rivers. However, this area has experienced recent and ongoing deforestation and habitat fragmentation. To quantify habitat loss and fragmentation of natural forests, as well as the land-cover changes in the Changhua watershed, we analyzed Landsat images obtained in 1988, 1995, and 2005.

Geospatial information of small mangrove islands in the Philippines is usually lacking. Such information is vital to monitor mangrove cover change and craft plans for their sustainable management. This study was conducted to provide some land use information about Banacon Island in Bohol province. The island is renowned for its vast mangrove plantations, community-initiated reforestation, and double reef system. To determine the different forest land uses therein, the study employed a maximum likelihood classification method using two Landsat images of different periods.

The concept of nature as capital is gaining visibility in policies and practices in both the public and private sectors. This change is due to an improved ability to assess and value ecosystem services, as well as to a growing recognition of the potential of an ecosystem services approach to make tradeoffs in decision making more transparent, inform efficient use of resources, enhance resilience and sustainability, and avoid unintended negative consequences of policy actions.

The analysis of evaluable information on degradation and dangerous natural processes at the agricultural lands on Asian territory of the Russian Federation (according to the data of 1991-2015) was done. The natural processes negatively affecting the soil (available land) are divided into groups according to their hazard extent: a) processes oriented to destroy the soils and lands, b) processes changing the soil cover pattern and leading to degradation of soils and decreasing their fertility

In this paper, responses of germination physiology of pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) seeds to drought stress in karst water environment and non-karst (allogenic) water environment were studied to explore the adaptability of pigeon pea to karst environment.