Changes in land use and climate and their significantly impacts on the hydrological cycle are of widespread concern to researchers and policy makers. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is used to analyze the effects of land use change and climate variability in the upper Naoli River watershed in the Sanjiang plain, northeast China. The remarkable land use changes include the decrease of woodland and wetland along with the farmland increasing.

SUMMARYSemi-structured interviews were used to explore how rural communities near forests are responding to environmental change in three African nations — Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Rwanda. The study first recounts people's perception of environmental change — what are the issues of greatest concern identified by local communities? Second, it explores people's responses to identified environmental problems and in particular the role of forests in these processes.

CONTEXT: In addition to biodiversity conservation, California rangelands generate multiple ecosystem services including livestock production, drinking and irrigation water, and carbon sequestration. California rangeland ecosystems have experienced substantial conversion to residential land use and more intensive agriculture.

KEY MESSAGE : We compiled 2,458 biomass equations from 168 destructive sampling studies in Indonesia. Unpublished academic theses contributed the largest share of the biomass equations. The availability of the biomass equations was skewed to certain regions, forest types, and species. Further research is necessary to fill the data gaps in emission factors and to enhance the implementation of climate change mitigation projects and programs.

CONTEXT: We studied the influence of human activities and climate change on water quantity and quality. Human activities included methods of agricultural policy, i.e. land use and management practices. OBJECTIVES: Finland started to follow EU’s agricultural policy in 1995. In this study our main objective was to find out whether the original targets of the Finnish Agri-Environmental Programme (FAEP) were achieved. METHODS: We analyzed trends in discharge, water quality and climate parameters in 37 years long time-series in two catchments.

The robustness of the physically-based, semi-distributed hydrological model ECOMAG with respect to changing (climatic or land-use) conditions was evaluated for two basins, considered within the modelling workshop held in the frame of the 2013 IAHS conference in Göteborg, Sweden. The first basin, the Garonne River basin, France, is characterized mostly by changes in climatic conditions, while the second, Obyån Creek, Sweden, was exposed to drastic land cover change due to deforestation.

AIM: Efforts to adapt conservation to climate change are hampered by a scarcity of studies of community‐level ecological responses. We examined temporal (40 years) and spatial (1700 m elevational gradient) variation in butterfly communities, aiming to test whether the composition of communities in terms of species' thermal envelopes tracked regional warming, and whether local habitat influenced community responses to climate variation. LOCATION: Sierra de Guadarrama (central Spain).

CONTEXT: Wildfire is a particular concern in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) of the western United States where human development occurs close to flammable natural vegetation. OBJECTIVES: (1) Assess the relative influences of WUI expansion versus climate-driven fire regime change on spatial and temporal patterns of burned WUI, and (2) determine whether WUI developed in the future will have higher or lower wildfire risk than existing WUI.

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a practice of growing importance in the United Kingdom, particularly in the southeast of England where the water availability per person is even less than in many Mediterranean countries. Although there is a huge amount of rainfall in the north and west of England and Wales, water resources in the southeast and east of England are under pressure due to the growing population and the changing climate. Therefore, RWH becomes particularly important to reduce the dependence on the mains water supply.

This study presents a method to estimate streamflow in rivers regulated by lakes or reservoirs using synthetic satellite remote sensing data. To illustrate the approach, the new reservoir routing method is integrated into the Hillslope River Routing model, and a case study is presented for the highly regulated river in the Cumberland River basin (46,400 km²). The study period is April–May 2000, which contains a significant flood event that occurred in 1–2 May 2000.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Replacing paddy rice by upland systems such as maize cultivation is an on-going trend in SE Asia caused by increasing water scarcity and higher demand for meat. How such land management changes will feedback on soil C and N cycles and soil greenhouse gas emissions is not well understood at present. METHODS: A new LandscapeDNDC biogeochemical module was developed that allows the effect of land management changes on soil C and N cycle to be simulated.

Projections of the response of crop yield to climate change at different spatial scales are known to vary. However, understanding of the causes of systematic differences across scale is limited. Here, we hypothesize that heterogeneous cropping intensity is one source of scale dependency. Analysis of observed global data and regional crop modelling demonstrate that areas of high vs. low cropping intensity can have systematically different yields, in both observations and simulations.