Mining disturbs large forested areas around the world, including boreal forests after oil sands mining in Canada. Industrial companies are expected to reclaim degraded land to ecosystems with equivalent land capability. This research showed the value of woody debris for reclamation of dramatically disturbed landscapes with a forest ecosystem end land use. Adding woody debris during reclamation can facilitate recovery of flora, soil nutrient cycling and water and nutrient holding capacity.

This paper updates an analysis of returns from major productive land uses in New Zealand carried out in 2008. Trends in profitability over time are shown, and a preliminary investigation of the relationship between land-use change towards forestry (new land planting) and forestry profitability is described.

Land improvements with long pay-back periods are often delayed on leased agricultural land. The delay in improvements has been found to result in land degradation, decreased land productivity and environmental problems. An important question is thus how landowners would respond to regulations and mandates concerning land improvements. Based on a Finnish landowner survey, we analysed landowner choices under certain land improvement regulations, using the currently dominant choice of leasing land for agricultural use as the benchmark.

This paper examines the combined effects of catchment complexity in terms of physiography, land use patterns, and lithology on the export of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and dissolved silica from heterogeneous nested catchments in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. Using results from water quality monitoring at 24 sampling sites, we determined the first-order controls on these fluxes.

Complexity embedded in coastal management leads to numerous questions as to how inherent spatial and temporal linkages among evapotranspiration (ET), depth to groundwater and land-use/land-cover change (LUCC) could affect the dynamics among these seemingly unrelated events. This article aims to address such unique dynamics in the nexus of physical geography and ecohydrology.

Slash and burn agriculture is a traditional and predominant land use practice in Madagascar and its relevance in the context of forest preservation is significant. At the end of a cycle of culture, the fields become mostly weed covered and the soil fertility starts to drop. As a consequence, these fields are abandoned (they are called “monka”) and the farmers, in the best case, re-use old surfaces where the vegetation has recovered to some extent. Nevertheless, some of the farmers continue to extend part of their cultures into the natural forest.

Plant-derived carbon compounds enter soils in a number of forms; two of the most abundant being leaf litter and rhizodeposition. Our knowledge concerning the predominant controls on the cycling of leaf litter far outweighs that for rhizodeposition even though the constituents of rhizodeposits includes a cocktail of low molecular weight organic compounds which represent a rapidly cycling source of carbon, readily available to soil microbes.

This study uses a combination of remote sensing data, field observations and information from local people to analyze the patterns and dynamics of land-use/cover changes for 35 years from 1972 to 2007 in the arid and semi-arid Northern Afar rangelands, Ethiopia. A pixel-based supervised image classification was used to map land-use/cover classes. People's perceptions and ecological time-lines were used to explain the driving forces linked to the changes. A rapid reduction in woodland cover (97%) and grassland cover (88%) took place between 1972 and 2007.

The aim of this study is to produce georeferenced ecological information about the suitable habitats available for gaur Bos gaurus in Chandoli tiger reserve, India (17° 04′ 00″ N to 17° 19′ 54″ N and 73° 40′ 43″ E to 73° 53′ 09″ E). Habitat suitability index (H.S.I.) was developed using multiple logistic regression (MLR) integrated with remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS).

Anthropogenic land use changes often alter natural patterns of disease transmission. The goal of this study was to determine whether phosphorus input from sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum L., cultivation in northern Belize could pose a significant environmental impact on malaria transmission by changing vegetation structure and composition of wetlands and associated larval habitats. Our primary focus was on the increased dominance of cattail, Typha domingensis Pers., a favored habitat for Anopheles vestitipennis Dyar & Knab.

The question of how smallholders of the Amazon estuary, locally known as cabolcos , have adapted their land use systems to produce resources during booms and busts is analyzed in this article. We draw upon more than 50 years of census data and more than 30 years of remotely sensed land-cover data to reconstruct these dynamics from World War II to the present.