The sluggish increase in the area productivity of staple crops is a major factor causing increased dependence of African countries on food imports. The increased use of mineral fertiliser may dramatically improve the food balance of many countries and result in lower food prices, higher food supply and consumption, and improved food security and nutritional status. In Benin, West Africa, political measures to improve farmers' access to fertiliser are biased in favour of cotton production.

Property rights are a central topic in conservation debates, but their influence on environmental outcomes is rarely carefully assessed. This study compared land use, tree planting practices and arboreal vegetation on government, estate private, smallholder private and communal “family” lands in Saint Lucia. The influence of tenure was apparent, but overall not a strong predictor of either farmer practices or vegetation characteristics. Higher abundance of planted trees on smallholder private lands was offset by greater abundance of natural forest trees on estate and family lands.

Estuaries provide vital habitat to a wide variety of fish species, so understanding how human activities impact estuarine habitats has important implications for management and conservation of fish stocks. We used nationwide datasets on anthropogenic disturbance to perform a quantitative assessment of habitat stressors in US estuaries. Habitat stressors were characterized by four categories of indicator datasets: (1) land cover/land use, (2) alteration of river flows, (3) pollution sources, and (4) eutrophication.

Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature.

Floods exert significant pressure on human societies. Assessments of an ecosystem's capacity to regulate and to prevent floods relative to human demands for flood regulating ecosystem services can provide important information for environmental management. In this study, the capacities of different ecosystems to regulate floods were assessed through investigations of water retention functions of the vegetation and soil cover.

Forest fire is a major cause of changes in forest structure and function. Among various floristic regions, the northeast region of India suffers maximum from the fires due to age-old practice of shifting cultivation and spread of fires from jhum fields. For proper mitigation and management, an early warning of forest fires through risk modeling is required. The study results demonstrate the potential use of remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) in identifying forest fire prone areas in Manipur, southeastern part of Northeast India.

The main objective of this study was to investigate changing of land uses and land covers and to compare current conditions of the basin with project results that were performed in 1961-2006 and to determine some soil properties of the basin. Stand relating to 1995 and 2006, geological and topographical maps and climatic data were used in this study. According to results, while forest area covered 14.5 % of the total area in 1955 was increased (35.8 %), degraded coppice, degraded blackpine and agricultural lands were decreased 5.7, 1.8 and 15.8% respectively.

Land-use emissions accompanying biomass loss, change in soil organic carbon (ΔSOC) and decomposing wood-products, were comparable with fossil fuel emissions in the late 20th century. We examine the rates, magnitudes and uncertainties for major carbon (C) fluxes for rangelands due to commercial grazing and climate change in Australia. Total net C emission from biomass over 369Mha of rangeland to-date was 0.73 (±0.40)Pg, with 83% of that from the potentially forested 53% of the rangelands. A higher emission estimate is likely from a higher resolution analysis.

Pastoralism and agriculture have affected rangeland ecosystems over the past millennia, including many ecosystems that are currently protected as reserves. However, the legacy of these land-use practices on current ecosystem functioning remains unclear. We studied legacy effects of former human land use on soil physical and chemical properties in a South African savanna.

The need for new sources of renewable energies and the rising price of fossil fuels have induced the hope that agricultural crops may be a source of renewable energy for the future. We question in this paper the best strategies to convert solar radiation into both energy and food. The intrinsic efficiency of the photosynthetic process is quite low (around 3%) while commercially available monocristalline solar photovoltaic (PV) panels have an average yield of 15%. Therefore huge arrays of solar panels are now envisaged.