Intensive land use activities worldwide have caused considerable loss to many ecosystem services. The dynamics of these threats must be quickly investigated to ensure timely update of management strategies and policies. Compared with complex models, mapping approaches that use scoring matrices…
Using landscape moderation insurance and Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis (IDH) as frameworks, this study assessed the response of local assemblage among different land use regimes (mean β-diversity), using the Jaccard dissimilarity matrix in contrasting Human Modified Forest Landscapes (…
Bush encroachment is a matter of growing concern in the semi-arid regions of Namibia. Locally adapted, long-term solutions for land restoration must be elaborated. It is crucial that local scientists are empowered to map and monitor the degradation process themselves, our authors maintain.
As climate change makes precipitation shocks more common, policymakers are becoming increasingly interested in protecting food systems and nutrition outcomes from the damaging effects of droughts and floods (Wheeler and von Braun, 2013). Increasing the resilience of nutrition and food security…
Although advances in remote sensing have enhanced mapping and monitoring of irrigated areas, producing accurate cropping information through satellite image classification remains elusive due to the complexity of landscapes, changes in reflectance of different land-covers, the remote sensing…
This eco-type map presents land units with distinct vegetation and exposure to floods (or droughts) in three villages in the Barotseland, Zambia. The knowledge and eco-types descriptions were collected from participatory mapping and focus group discussions with 77 participants from Mapungu,…
Recent estimates show that one third of the world’s land and water resources are highly or moderately degraded. Global economic losses from land degradation (LD) are as high as USD $10.6 trillion annually. These trends catalyzed a call for avoiding future LD, reducing ongoing LD, and reversing…
Urban agriculture is said to be increasing with global urbanization. However, there is little examination of the temporal or spatial dynamics of urban agriculture. We investigated the benefits and challenges experienced by community gardeners in four towns in South Africa, along with GIS…
Innovative, pragmatic approaches are needed to support sustainable livelihoods and landscape management in complex social-ecological systems (CSES) such as river catchments. In the Tsitsa River Catchment, South Africa, researchers and natural resource managers have come together to apply such…
Revisiting South Africa's land and agrarian questions / Grasian Mkodzongi and Femke Brandt -- Broadening conceptions of democracy and citizenship : the subaltern histories of rural resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana / Sarah Bruchhausen and Camalita Naicker -- From material to cultural :…