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Displaying 646 - 650 of 1605Conservation Practices for Climate Change Adaptation
The threat of climate change is a great challenge to sustainable land management (USDA-NRCS, 2010a). Several publications have reported that over the last few decades, rainfall intensities have increased in many parts of the world, including in the United States. Without good, productive soils and the ecosystem services provided by them, the survival of our species will be in jeopardy. The future changes in climate that will drive erosion processes will significantly impact soil erosion rates, with higher projected erosion rates for the United States.
High N₂O emissions in dry ecosystems
Denitrification is an anaerobic respiration that reduces nitrogen (N) oxides (NO₃ ⁻, NO₂ ⁻) to N gases (N₂O, N₂). Our hypothesis suggests that this process might be an important process in depleting nitrogen in dryland soils, based on the idea that the intensity of microbial respiration following infrequent rainfall events and floods, is high enough to deplete soil O₂ concentrations and allow denitrification to occur. We tested our hypothesis by analyses of soil surface samples, collected along a rainfall gradient.
transaction cost approach to climate adaptation: Insights from Coase, Ostrom and Williamson and evidence from the 400-year old zangjeras
I argue in this paper that transaction cost is central to the analytics of climate adaptation in the local commons. I illustrate this by bringing together insights from Coase on tradability of property rights, Ostrom on institutional design principles for long lived commons and Williamson on transaction cost and governance mechanisms. I call this the COW model on the analytics of climate adaptation, which I illustrate using grounded theory in the case of the 400-year old zangjera irrigation societies in Northern Philippines.
Assessment of soil erosion and deposition rates in a Moroccan agricultural field using fallout ¹³⁷Cs and ²¹⁰Pbₑₓ
In Morocco land degradation – mainly caused by soil erosion – is one of the most serious agroenvironmental threats encountered. However, only limited data are available on the actual magnitude of soil erosion. The study site investigated was an agricultural field located in Marchouch (6°42′ W, 33° 47′ N) at 68 km south east from Rabat. This work demonstrates the potential of the combined use of ¹³⁷Cs, ²¹⁰Pbₑₓ as radioisotopic soil tracers to estimate mid and long term erosion and deposition rates under Mediterranean agricultural areas.
self-adapting fuzzy inference system for the evaluation of agricultural land
The inference rules relating land characteristics to suitability class are crucial to the estimation of agricultural land suitability. In fuzzy logic modeling for agricultural land evaluation, the fuzzy inference, based on membership functions and rule aggregation, is constructed with predetermined evaluation criteria, including value ranges for fuzzy linguistic terms, and weights of land variables. However, most existing evaluation criteria systems are built on the basis of expert knowledge and can be highly subjective and contain uncertainty.