The pygmy rabbit (Brachylagus idahoensis), the world's smallest rabbit, has a limited distribution due to its year round dependence on sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) for food and shelter. Due to accelerating habitat loss from fragmentation, development, and fire, understanding the pygmy rabbit's ecology has become increasingly important. In 2010, we initiated a study of the status of a pygmy rabbit population and its habitat requirements on U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land near Woodruff in northeastern Utah.

This paper focuses on irrigation schemes under rotational water supply in arid and semiarid regions. It presents a methodology for developing plans for optimum allocation of land area and water, considering performance measures such as productivity, equity and adequacy. These irrigation schemes are characterized by limited water supply and heterogeneity in soils, crops, climate and water distribution network, etc.

Land management causes changes in forest structure and thus influences the composition and abundance of communities of forest-inhabiting bird species. However, it is unclear how these changes translate into local habitat suitability for certain bird species given that detailed knowledge on habitat use by forest bird species is still scarce. We have analyzed the habitat preferences of 37 breeding bird species in 19 lowland beech forests, each with an average size of 40 ha.

The acceleration of soil erosion by water in most regions of the world in response to the anthropogenic modification of landscapes is a serious threat to natural ecosystem functionalities because of the loss of invaluable constituents such as soil particles and organic carbon (OC). While soil OC erosion is likely to be a major component of the global C cycle, water erosion-induced CO₂ emissions remain uncertain. In this study, our main objective was to compare the release of CO₂ from eroded topsoils and from the sediments exported by diffuse erosion during an entire rainy season.

AIM: Prescribed fire is a common land management for reducing risks from unplanned fires. However, the universality of such effectiveness remains uncertain due to biogeographical variation in fuel types, climatic influences and fire regimes. Here, we explore biogeographical patterns in the effectiveness of prescribed fire by calculating leverage (the reduction in unplanned area burnt resulting from recent previous area burnt) across south‐eastern Australia over a 25 year period. LOCATION: The 30 bioregions of south‐eastern Australia.

The Little Bustard Tetrax tetrax is one of the most threatened steppe bird species in Europe, due mainly to agricultural intensification. Despite the relative importance of the Iberian population (approximately 50% of the global population) little is known about its dynamics and trends, especially in core distribution areas. This study evaluates the influences of meteorological factors and land management on the oscillations and medium-term trends of two Little Bustard populations in Central Spain.

SummaryThe recognition that biodiversity conservation requires more than a system of reserves has led to the need to consider the outcomes of land management actions, such as timber harvesting, in the matrix land outside reserves. The design of harvesting systems can be guided by the natural disturbance regime, which in Tasmania's lowland wet eucalypt forests is infrequent, intense wildfire.