Climate change affected the agricultural expansion and the formation of farming-grazing transitional patterns during historical periods. This study analyzed the possible range of the boundary shift of the potential suitable agriculture area in the farming-grazing transitional zone in the northeastern China during the 20th century.

Sediment transport in rivers is an indicator of soil eroded from various sediment sources, of which agricultural land can be a significant one, and the intensity of the phenomenon provides a measure of land degradation at a watershed level.

Shrub cover has increased in semi-arid regions worldwide. This change has generally been viewed as land degradation, due to shrub-induced declines in pastoral productivity. As a consequence, widespread management treatments to reduce shrub density have been applied in many pastoral areas. These treatments, however, often do not have long-term positive benefits for forage production.

Water is critical to protecting wetlands in arid regions, especially in agriculture-dominated watersheds. This comparative case study analyzes three federal wildlife refuges in the Bear River Basin of the U.S. West where refuge managers secured water supplies by adapting to their local environmental context and their refuge's relationship to agriculture in being either irrigation-dependent, reservoir-adjacent or diked-delta wetlands.

Swat is part of the high mountain Hindu-Kush Himalayan region of Pakistan, with diverse biophysical and socio-economic characteristics. The region is endowed with many fragile and fragmented ecosystems, and land use and land cover changes have accelerated destructive processes with irreversible effects on ecosystems. The paper aims to (1) find proximate and underlying causes of land use and land cover changes; (2) analyse the drivers of change; and (3) reflect on the role of governance and policy.

Detailed urban land-cover maps are essential information for sustainable planning. Land-cover maps assist planners in designing strategies for the optimisation of urban ecosystem services and climate change adaptation. In this study, the statistical software R was applied to land cover analysis for the Catania metropolitan area in Sicily, Italy. Six land cover classes were extracted from high-resolution orthophotos. Five different classification algorithms were compared. Texture and contextual layers were tested in different combinations as ancillary data.

To address land degradation and rural poverty the Chinese government has put in place a series of land conversion programmes in the Loess Plateau area in northern China. In addition to problems arising from unsustainable land use, water resource availability driven in part by climatic forcing is also a threat to livelihoods in this region. To understand climate impacts on farming practice in poor areas of China, field observation and village reconnaissance took place in the summer of 2009 in three selected counties of Shaanxi and Ningxia Province, northern China.

Decision support to develop viable climate change adaptation strategies for agriculture and regional land use management encompasses a wide range of options and issues. Up to now, only a few suitable tools and methods have existed for farmers and regional stakeholders that support the process of decision-making in this field. The interactive model-based spatial information and decision support system LandCaRe DSS attempts to close the existing methodical gap.

In order to understand the genetic diversity of wild Ussurian pears in China, chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) of 186 wild accessions from 12 populations in Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin Provinces and 51 Chinese and European pear cultivars including Pyrus ussuriensis, Pyrus pyrifolia, Pyrus bretschneideri, Pyrus sinkiangensis and Pyrus communis were investigated. Each accession was classified into one of three types (types A, B and C) based on two large deletions in the hypervariable regions between the accD–psaI and rps16–trnQ genes.

In the anthropogenic fire-disturbed ecosystem of the San Francisco Valley in the Andes of southeastern Ecuador, dense stands of an aggressive invasive weed, the southern bracken fern (Pteridium arachnoideum and Pteridium caudatum), dominate the landscape. To secure sustainable land management in the region, a comprehensive understanding of bracken spatial-distribution patterns and life cycle dynamics is crucial.

During the last decade, the use of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for drought monitoring applications has drawn many criticisms, mainly because a number of drivers such as land-cover/land-use change, pest infestation, and flooding may depress the NDVI, further causing false drought identification. In this study, the impacts of land-cover change on the NDVI-derived satellite drought indicator, the vegetation condition index (VCI), are presented.

We compared the properties of the clay mineral fraction and the composition of soil solutions in a Fagus sylvatica coppice (native forest) and four adjacent plantations of Pseudotsuga menziesii, Pinus nigra, Picea abies and Quercus sessiliflora planted in 1976. The results revealed changes of clay fraction properties due to tree species effect. Clay samples from Douglas fir and pine stands differ when compared to other species.