Soil erosion is by far the greatest cause of land degradation and other environmental and socio‐economic problems in China. Although various conservation methods are widely utilized to reduce soil erosion and to sustain agricultural production, the cost‐effectiveness and selection of these methods are less known. Using our survey and ecological data, this study evaluated four soil and water conservation methods in Changting County, Southeast China. The results show that the disparity of conservation costs is much larger than that of ecological benefits.

Agriculture is major sector in the economy of Central Asia. The sustainable use of agricultural land is therefore essential to economic growth, human well-being, social equity, and ecosystem services. However, salinization, erosion, and desertification cause severe land degradation which, in turn, degrade human health and ecosystem services. Here, we review the impact of agricultural land use in the five countries of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, during 2008–2013 in 362 articles.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a vital role in determining the susceptibility to land degradation. The recommended procedure for the recovery of the characteristic poor soils of the Southern region of Portugal is the installation of grazed permanent pastures and increase of soil fertility.

In the Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopian highlands, rainfall distribution is extremely uneven both spatially and temporally. Drought frequently results in crop failure, while high rainfall intensities result in low infiltration and high runoff causing soil erosion and land degradation. These combined factors contribute to low agricultural productivity and high levels of food insecurity. Poor land management practices coupled with lack of effective rainwater management strategies aggravate the situation.

Fertilization is one of the most important factors to improve plant characteristics and nutrient uptake. Biological N2 Fixation (BNF) is a process of great importance in crop production systems, to enhance sustainability and prevent land degradation in modern agriculture. The impact of the biofertilizer (NPKB) produced from PK rock biofertilizer mixed with earthworm compound enriched in N by free living diazotrophic bacteria and of the bioprotector (NPKP) with chitosan from Cunninghamella elegans were investigated in a field experiment with melon.

This review assesses existing data, models, and other knowledge-based methods for valuing the effects of sustainable land management including the cost of land degradation on a global scale. The overall development goal of sustainable human well-being should be to obtain social, ecologic, and economic viability, not merely growth of the market economy. Therefore new and more integrated methods to value sustainable development are needed. There is a huge amount of data and methods currently available to model and analyze land management practices.

This article presents the results of evaluation of environmental management of natural - resource potential of Orenburgregion.

В данной статье приводятся результаты оценки показателей экологической эффективности управленияприродно-ресурсным потенциалом Оренбургской области.

Salinization and sodication are abiotic soil factors, important hazards to soil fertility and consequently affect the crop production. Soil salinization is of great concern for irrigated agriculture in arid and semi‐arid regions of the world; sodicity is characterized by an excessively high concentration of sodium (Na) in their cation exchange system. In recent times, attention has been turned to study the impacts of these factors (salinity and sodicity) on soil microbial activities.

The development of sustainable agricultural and food systems is of significant importance considering the still-growing world population. For this, it is imperative to consider not only quantitative production issues, but also environmental issues such as water pollution, biodiversity loss, and land degradation as well as social and economic issues such as organization of supply chains and communication and coordination among stakeholders.

The present study investigates the relationship between land degradation and the evolution of the productive structure in Italy during the last 50 years (1960–2010). The objectives of the study are twofold: (i) to present and discuss an original analysis of the income–environment relationship in an economic-convergent and environmental–divergent country and (ii) to evaluate the impact of the (changing) productive structure and selected socio-demographic characteristics on the level of land vulnerability.

Leymus chinensis is a dominant grass species in the Inner Mongolia steppes owing to its high vegetative productivity, good palatability for cattle, and abundant horizontally creeping rhizomes. Drought is generally regarded as one of the main environmental issues that is becoming a daunting challenge to the growth of plants, and ultimately results in land degradation.

Natural, as well as human-induced, landscape changes may have profound effects on soil-loss rates in Mediterranean countries. Knowledge of the spatial and temporal distribution of the erosion processes from 1984 to 2013 across the fire-prone island of Thassos was gained on the basis of a joint analysis of imagery received from three generations of Landsat satellites. Soil loss was modeled using the revised universal soil loss equation.