Agriculture production in developing countries must be increased to meet food demand for a growing population. Earlier literature suggests that sustainable land management could increase food production without degrading soil and water resources. Improved agronomic practices include organic fertilization, minimum soil disturbance, and incorporation of residues, terraces, water harvesting and conservation, and agroforestry. These practices can also deliver co-benefits in the form of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and enhanced carbon storage in soils and biomass.

The People's Republic of China‐Global Environment Facility Partnership to Combat Land Degradation in Dryland Ecosystems promotes an integrated ecosystem management (IEM) approach to restore, sustain and enhance the productive capacity of dryland ecosystems. This paper provides an analysis and synthesis of the funding strategies, methods and approaches that have been applied and tested under the Partnership to pilot and scale up IEM and sustainable land management (SLM) practices in the western People's Republic of China under its first 10 years.

The interaction between land use/cover change and landscape pattern is pivotal in research concerning global environmental change. This study uses three different Landsat images of 1989, 1998 and 2009 to study the land use/cover and landscape pattern changes in the middle reaches of the Tarim River basin. envi®, erdas®, ArcGIS® and fragstats® software were used to analyse the land use/cover changes. The objectives of study were to map and study the changes in land use/cover and landscape pattern, and propose some possible factors in making the land use/cover changes from 1989 to 2009.

Testate amoebae represent a crucial component of soil microfauna and have been studied extensively in ombrotrophic peatlands. However, little is known about their ecology in moorlands which are important habitats in terms of biodiversity and carbon storage potential. Moorlands are under threat from a range of factors such as drainage, burning, over grazing, pollution and climate change.

The natural soil N supply in volcanic soils (Andisols) can be a significant source of plant-available N for agro-ecosystems. Nevertheless, intensive farming systems in south Chile apply high fertilization rates, which lead to high production costs and involve a risk for adverse ecosystem effects. In order to achieve sustainable land management, a better understanding of the processes that govern soil N availability and loss, and their external drivers, is required.

The use of co-investment activities to motivate farmers to carry out sustainable land management is increasingly recognized. Several co-investment efforts have been implemented to combat land degradation and increase agricultural production in the Ethiopian highlands. Nevertheless, these co-investment activities have not been documented. Moreover, the impacts of these activities have not been evaluated. This study presents a co-investment initiative for sustainable land management in the Galessa watershed in Ethiopia.

Phytoremediation could be a sustainable remediation alternative for conventional remediation technologies. However, its implementation on a commercial scale remains disappointing. To emphasize its sustainability, this paper examines whether and how the potential economic benefit of CO2 abatement for different crops used for phytoremediation or sustainable land management purposes could promote phytotechnologies. Our analysis is based on a case study in the Campine region, where agricultural soils are contaminated with mainly cadmium.

The Alqueva reservoir created the largest artificial lake of Western Europe in 2010. Since then, the region has faced challenges due to land-use changes that may increase the risk of erosion and shorten the lifetime of the reservoir, increasing the need to promote land management sustainability. This paper investigates the aspect of seasonality of soil erosion using a comprehensive methodology that integrates the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) approach, geographic information systems, geostatistics, and remote-sensing.

Indonesia is subject to rapid land use change. One of the main causes for the conversion of land is the rapid expansion of the oil palm sector. Land use change involves a progressive loss of forest cover, with major impacts on biodiversity and global CO₂ emissions. Ecosystem services have been proposed as a concept that would facilitate the identification of sustainable land management options, however, the scale of land conversion and its spatial diversity pose particular challenges in Indonesia.

A key challenge of land-use modelling for supporting sustainable land management is to understand how environmental feedback that emerges from land-use actions can reshape land-use decisions in the long term. To investigate this issue, we apply the Human–Environment System framework formulated by Scholz (2011) as a conceptual guide to read typical feedback loops in land-use systems. We use an agent-based land-use change model (LUDAS) developed by Le et al.

Understanding changes in soil quality resulting from land use and land management changes is important to design sustainable land management plans or interventions. This study evaluated the influence of land use and land cover (LULC) on key soil quality indicators (SQIs) within a small watershed (Jedeb) in the Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopia. Factor analysis based on principal component analysis (PCA) was used to determine different SQIs.

The Shangri-La County of the Yunnan Province, SW China, is an economically and ecologically important area. This is especially true for Jiantang that is famous for the Napahai, Bitahai and Shudu Lake wetlands. However, continuing development has threatened the wetland ecosystems and the associated biodiversity in these areas. To better document such changes in land use and their effect on the ecosystem, land use was mapped using a time series of satellite images acquired in 1974, 1993, 2000 and 2012. The results of this survey suggest that forest cover first decreased and then increased.