The evaluation of landscape services essentially deals with the complex and dynamic relationships between humans and their environment. When it comes to landscape management and the evaluation of the benefits these services provide for our well-being, there is a limited representation of stakeholder and intangible values on the land. Stakeholder knowledge is essential, since disciplinary expert evaluations and existing proxy data on landscape services can reveal little of the landscape benefits to the local stakeholders.

Choosing effective policy instruments to achieve conservation goals has many challenges. We explore the challenge of instrument choice in the context of landscape-scale conservation on private land, where the challenge is to select instruments that are able to influence the management practices of large numbers of landholders with diverse values, beliefs and management priorities. We report on a landholder survey and workshop undertaken as part of a study focused on reversing scattered tree decline on private grazing land in Australia.

We reviewed the scope and quality of published literature relevant to management of the risk of fire and accompanying risks to ecological values, in the vegetation types (mostly forests and woodlands, but including grasslands and herbfields) of the High Country (>750m asl) of south-eastern Australia. Our analysis of quality suggests the published science has improved markedly over the past 60years. That said, there is insufficient data on any subject for a formal meta-analysis.

Three mega-fires in Victoria over the period 2002–2009 burnt some 3million hectares, or 40% of the state’s public land. In the worst of these bushfires—Black Saturday, 7 February 2009–173 people lost their lives in Australia’s worst civilian tragedy. Each of these three fires was followed by intensive inquiries and investigations, the most prolonged and intensive being a Royal Commission inquiry (the most rigorous form of legal inquiry in Australia) into the Black Saturday fires.

There are 12 conservation land trust organizations (CLTOs) in the province of Alberta, Canada that actively steward land. Together they have protected over 1.09 million hectares of land. Using in-depth interview data with published documents on CLTOs, this paper examines how CLTOs make decisions as to which projects to pursue and the kinds of justifications they offer for the projects they have completed. We identify 13 aspects that such a decision-making process should contain. The CLTOs studied have, to some degree, incorporated 7 of them.

Reindeer Rangifer tarandus tarandus husbandry in Sweden commonly uses the Scandinavian mountain chain as grazing area during the snow-free season and the coniferous forests in the east during winter. Current knowledge of habitat use by reindeer is primarily based on traditional or local knowledge, or on investigations carried out on wild reindeer and caribou in other parts of the world. We identified spatial and temporal habitat use of free-ranging semi-domesticated reindeer by following 48 GPS-equipped reindeer in three summer ranges in the Swedish reindeer herding area.

Silvopastoral systems are sustainable form of land management promoted by European Union. The productivity of the herbaceous and tree components in a silvopastoral system could be limited by soil fertility. The use of adequate doses of organic fertilisers like sewage sludge could enhance the productivity of both pasture and trees and promote biodiversity. The quantification of the best dose of sewage sludge to be applied in a silvopastoral system is important in order to enhance production and biodiversity in a silvopastoral system, while avoiding nitrate contamination of the ground water.

This paper focuses on irrigation schemes under rotational water supply in arid and semiarid regions. It presents a methodology for developing plans for optimum allocation of land area and water, considering performance measures such as productivity, equity and adequacy. These irrigation schemes are characterized by limited water supply and heterogeneity in soils, crops, climate and water distribution network, etc.

Land management causes changes in forest structure and thus influences the composition and abundance of communities of forest-inhabiting bird species. However, it is unclear how these changes translate into local habitat suitability for certain bird species given that detailed knowledge on habitat use by forest bird species is still scarce. We have analyzed the habitat preferences of 37 breeding bird species in 19 lowland beech forests, each with an average size of 40 ha.

The acceleration of soil erosion by water in most regions of the world in response to the anthropogenic modification of landscapes is a serious threat to natural ecosystem functionalities because of the loss of invaluable constituents such as soil particles and organic carbon (OC). While soil OC erosion is likely to be a major component of the global C cycle, water erosion-induced CO₂ emissions remain uncertain. In this study, our main objective was to compare the release of CO₂ from eroded topsoils and from the sediments exported by diffuse erosion during an entire rainy season.