This paper investigates the effects of wheat genetic diversity and land degradation on risk and agricultural productivity in less favored production environments of a developing agricultural economy. Drawing production data from household survey conducted in the highlands of Ethiopia, we estimate a stochastic production function to evaluate the effects of variety richness, land degradation, and their interaction on the mean and the variance of wheat yield. Ethiopia is a centre of diversity for durum wheat and farmers manage complex variety mixtures on multiple plots.

Sigificant dependence from climate and anthropogenic influences characterize ecological systems of Kazakhstan. As result of the geographical location of the republic and ecological situation vegetative degradation sites exist throughout the territory of Kazakhstan. The major process of desertification takes place in the arid and semi-arid areas. To allocate spots of stable degradation of vegetation, the transition zone was first identified. Productivity of vegetation in transfer zone is slightly dependent on climate conditions.

It is becoming increasingly important to improve spatial resolutions of soil maps as a fundamental information layer for studying ecological processes and to tackle land degradation. There is growing interest in the use of remote sensing technologies to assist the identification and delineation of spatial variation in soils. This paper investigates whether selected properties of extensively weathered, low fertility soils can be predicted using high-resolution reflectance spectra over the range 400–2500nm.

In the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia gully occurrence is linked to poverty-driven unsustainable use of the land in a vulnerable semi-arid and mountainous environment, where intensive rainfall challenges the physical integrity of the landscape. Trends in gully and river channel erosion, and their relation to triggering environmental changes can proffer valuable insights into sustainable development in Northern Ethiopia.

Intensive overgrazing, practiced for the last decades in Inner Mongolia, has led to serious grassland degradation and deterioration of soil structure. As a consequence, the soil gas and water fluxes and therefore soil functions were affected by grazing. We investigated two steppe ecosystems characterized by two plant communities: Stipa grandis (SG) and Leymus chinensis (LCh) and different grazing intensities: ungrazed since 1979 (UG79), continuously grazed (CG, at the SG site) and winter grazed (WG, at the LCh site).

Changing environmental and socio-economic conditions make land degradation, a major concern in Central and East Asia. Globally satellite imagery, particularly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, has proved an effective tool for monitoring land cover change. This study examines 33 grassland water points using vegetation field studies and remote sensing techniques to track desertification on the Mongolian plateau.

Post-fire land degradation is often attributed to fire-induced soil water repellency, despite the fact that soil water repellency is a natural phenomenon in many soils and is therefore not necessarily caused by fire. To improve our understanding of the role of soil water repellency in causing fire-induced land degradation, a long-term monitoring study was performed in which the temporal variation of topsoil water repellency (0–2.5-cm depth) was captured in a Portuguese shrubland before and after fire between November 2007 and March 2010.

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.

The island of Sri Lanka is free from serious natural hazards such as volcanic activity and earthquakes resulting from climatic extremes, but there are impacts of many natural disasters, such as landslides, floods and droughts, the intensity and frequency of which are increasing due to human interventions. Some areas of Sri Lanka are also periodically subject to cyclones that occur due to climatic conditions and geographical locations.Land degradation denotes all natural or anthropogenic processes that diminish or impair productivity of land.

The island of Sri Lanka is free from serious natural hazards such as volcanic activity and earthquakes resulting from climatic extremes, but there are impacts of many natural disasters, such as landslides, floods and droughts, the intensity and frequency of which are increasing due to human interventions. Some areas of Sri Lanka are also periodically subject to cyclones that occur due to climatic conditions and geographical locations.Land degradation denotes all natural or anthropogenic processes that diminish or impair productivity of land.