Lactation can have significant costs to individual and population-level productivity because of the high energetic demands it places on dams. Because the difference in condition between lactating and dry Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni) cows tends to disappear as nutritional quality rises, the magnitude of that difference could be used to relate condition to habitat quality or the capability of habitats to support elk.

The effects of land management and disturbance on ecosystem performance (i.e. biomass production) are often confounded by those of weather and site potential. The current study overcomes this issue by calculating the difference between actual and expected ecosystem performance (EEP) to generate ecosystem performance anomalies (EPA). This study aims to delineate and quantify average EPA from 2000–2009 within the Greater Platte and Upper Colorado River Basins, USA.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was shown the necessity of detection and recording of socially-significant sights and brand objects in the process of managing land resources. There was examined the classification of land plots and objects of real estate, which appear to be territory brands. There were determined the main approaches to the formation of the system of such objects on the basic level of state management.

Sub-Saharan Africa is large and diverse with regions of food insecurity and high vulnerability to climate change. This project quantifies carbon stocks and fluxes in the humid forest zone of Ghana, as a part of an assessment in West Africa. The General Ensemble biogeochemical Modeling System (GEMS) was used to simulate the responses of natural and managed systems to projected scenarios of changes in climate, land use and cover, and nitrogen fertilization in the Assin district of Ghana.

A recently developed fluvial erosion model for blanket peatlands, PESERA-PEAT, was applied at ten sites across Great Britain to predict the response of blanket peat erosion to environmental change. Climate change to 2099 was derived from seven UKCP09 future projections and the UK Met Office’s historical dataset. Land management scenarios were established based on outputs from earlier published investigations. Modelling results suggested that as climate changes, the response of blanket peat erosion will be spatially very variable across Great Britain.

Many conservation land managers working with invasive plants rely largely on their own experience and advice from fellow managers for controlling weeds, and rarely take into consideration the scientific literature, a concrete example of a knowing–doing gap. We argue that invasion scientists should directly teach managers best practices for control. In 2013, we created a training program on five invasive plant species, specifically tailored to Québec (Canada) environmental managers. The course material was science-based, and included details on methods and costs.

For 25 years the Australian Landcare program has encouraged rural land managers to work cooperatively to resolve natural resource management issues across the nation. Landcare has spread and the model is used internationally. Despite its successes, Landcare has come under criticism for not sufficiently directing land management practices towards environmental sustainability. This criticism sees it as having maintained the “status quo”.

The term, Working Knowledge, is introduced to describe the content of a local cross-cultural knowledge recovery and integration project focussed on the indigenous-owned Oriners pastoral lease near Kowanyama on the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Social and biophysical scientific researchers collaborated with indigenous people, non-indigenous pastoralists, and an indigenous natural resource management (NRM) agency to record key ecological, hydrological and geomorphological features of this intermittently occupied and environmentally valuable ‘flooded forest’ country.

This study investigates how the floristic composition and species richness of fertile grasslands in the Swiss Alps has changed over the last three decades. A total of 259 phytosociological relevés in four regions were resurveyed after periods of between 17 and 29 years. Analysis of the data revealed that floristic composition of the grasslands changed significantly during the study period, although the factor 'time' explained only a small proportion of the total variation (2.0-4.1%).

Clearing of invasive alien plants (IAPs) is a necessary but expensive exercise. Typically, insufficient resources are available to clear all areas simultaneously. Consequently areas need to be prioritized for clearing. The financial resources available determine the extent of the area which can be cleared, while the prioritization identifies the location of the areas to be cleared. We investigate the following questions: (1) How does a change in the budget impact on the efficiency of the clearing operations over time? (2) How does this differ for different sites?

Throughout the world, many native species inhabit agricultural landscapes. While natural habitats will form the cornerstone of conservation efforts in production-oriented environments, the success of these efforts will be enhanced by a greater understanding of the potential contribution of the increasingly modified countryside ('matrix') elements in these landscapes. Here, we investigate the relative occurrence of birds in some landscape elements (i.e. land-uses, vegetation types) common to agricultural environments around the world.