Two long-term (16 year) experiments on intensively managed pastures compared extensive grazing, abandonment and continued intensive grazing and were assessed for impacts on soil parameters, plant nutrient content and ecological indicator values. There was a reduction in soil carbon and nitrogen in the abandoned treatment compared to the intensively managed treatment at the wetter site. At the drier site, extensive grazing resulted in a build up of soil carbon. There was a build up of dead organic matter and a reduction in the nutritive value of the vegetation as grazing was reduced.

Remote sensing provides a broad view of landscapes and can be consistent through time, making it an important tool for monitoring and managing protected areas. An impediment to broader use of remote sensing science for monitoring has been the need for resource managers to understand the specialized capabilities of an ever-expanding array of image sources and analysis techniques. Here, we provide guidelines that will enable land managers to more effectively collaborate with remote sensing scientists to develop and apply remote sensing science to achieve monitoring objectives.

CONTEXT: Unveiling the scale at which organisms respond to habitat features is crucial to understand how they are influenced by anthropogenic environmental changes. We implemented species distribution models (SDMs) based on multiple-scale landscape pattern analysis for four bat species representative of different foraging guilds: Nyctalus leisleri, Rhinolophus hipposideros, Myotis emarginatus and Pipistrellus pipistrellus.

Biological invasion represents one of the most serious threats to biodiversity, and invasion ecology research has become one of the central issues of contemporary environmental science. However, the relative role of soil development as correlated with succession in influencing variation in invasion resistance has seldom been examined. We hypothesized that the invasion potential of exotic plants depends on soil conditions. In this study, we explored variation among soils of three forest types in their resistance to invasion by Mikania micrantha H.B.K.

Accurate representation of actual terrestrial surface types at regional to global scales is an important element for many applications.

How do we manage the trade-offs between agricultural yields, biodiversity and ecosystem services? One option is to adopt high yield, intensive farming that allows land to be spared elsewhere for conservation (land sparing); another is to adopt low yield, extensive farming over a greater area that retains more biodiversity and protects ecosystem services (wildlife-friendly farming). We examine which is likely to be the best option to achieve high carbon storage and tree species richness in tropical cocoa-growing landscapes.

Bracken is often perceived as a widespread and increasing land management problem. The pollen record of a wide range of sites in Great Britain suggests that the current abundance of bracken is less than or, at worst, equivalent to maximum historical levels. Recently gathered data also suggest that bracken cover is declining. Results of risk assessments of land use change, and experimental and modelling investigations into the effects of climate change are synthesized.

CONTEXT: The identification of habitat structures with biologically meaningful links to habitat quality has enabled an increased understanding of wildlife distributions in fragmented landscapes. However, knowledge is lacking of where these structures occur in the landscape. OBJECTIVES: For a broad-scale agricultural landscape, we investigated how the occurrence and abundance of wildlife habitat structures is related to abiotic conditions and land management practices, and whether this differed between old growth and regrowth woodland.

Open ditch drainage is a commonly implemented land management practice in upland blanket peatlands, particularly in the UK, where policy decisions between the 1940s and 1970s led to widespread drainage of the uplands. The change in the hydrological regime associated with the drainage of blanket peat is poorly understood, yet has perceived importance for flooding, low flows and water quality. We propose a new simplified physics-based model that allows the associated hydrological processes and flow responses to be explored.

In the last decades, due to human land management that uses fire as a tool, and due to abnormal droughts, many tropical forests have become more susceptible to recurrent wildfires with negative consequences for biodiversity. Yet, studies are usually focused on few taxa and rarely compare different fire frequencies. We examined if the effects of single and recurrent fires are consistent for leaf litter ants, dung beetles, birds (sampled with point‐counts PC and mist net‐MN), saplings, and trees.

Long-term monitoring of surface water quality has shown increasing concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) across a large part of the Northern Hemisphere. Several drivers have been implicated including climate change, land management change, nitrogen and sulphur deposition and CO2 enrichment.

Large mammalian herbivores are major drivers of the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems world‐wide, and changes in their abundance have resulted in many populations being actively managed. Many empirical studies have identified that abundant mammalian herbivores can have negative impacts on biodiversity, but there has been no specific review of the impacts of native mammalian herbivores. We assessed the peer‐reviewed literature on the effects of large native herbivores on other animals.