Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major attribute of soil quality that responds to land management activities which is also important in the regulation of global carbon (C) cycling. This study evaluated bulk soil C and nitrogen (N) contents and C and N dynamics in three soil organic matter (SOM) fractions separated by density. The study was based on three tillage systems on farmer managed experiments (conventional tillage (CT), ripping (RP), direct seeding (DS)) and adjacent natural forest (NF) in Haplic Arenosols (sandy) and Rhodic Ferralsols (clayey) of Zimbabwe.

Although China still holds land in collective and state ownership, land use rights have been largely privatized. While transactions for forestland use rights have taken place for more than two decades, few detailed investigations of the transactions have been conducted. This study investigates 222 households in eight villages of Linan and Anji counties located within Zhejiang Province, and reports details of the transactions, their scope and motivation, and the characteristics of households participating in the market for forestland use rights.

Agricultural non-point source pollution (ANSP) is considered a major contributor to local water degradation in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) of China. The Xiangxi River, which is a first level anabranch of the Yangtze River, was selected for investigation of the effectiveness of selected best management measures (BMPs) to alleviate water pollution through analysis of several scenarios by SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool).

Rural areas in densely populated regions face increasing competition for land. Consequently, land use planning processes must attempt to balance the goals of diverse stakeholders and the process of reaching consensus becomes more complicated. By investigating the perception of the actors involved in rural planning, this research contributes to the knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of such processes. We have focused on the case of rural planning processes in Flanders in which proponents of nature and agriculture are competing for land.

Woody biomass production is a critical indicator in evaluation of land use management and the dynamics of the global carbon cycle (sequestration/emission) in terrestrial ecosystems. The objective of the present study was to develop, through a case study in Sudan, an operational multiscale remote-sensing-based methodology for large-scale estimation of woody biomass in tropical savannahs. Woody biomass estimation models obtained by different authors from destructive field measurements in different tropical savannah ecosystems were expressed as functions of tree canopy cover (CC).

The importance of the landscape as a tourism asset is well known, and the significance of perceptions of landscape is increasingly being recognized in policy and planning, in Europe thanks largely to the implementation of the European Landscape Convention. The abandonment of agricultural land is one of the ongoing processes of landscape change that are having a profound impact not only in Norway – the subject of this article – but across Europe.

The latest theories on the governance of water resources point to the need to adopt integrated approaches, allowing the mediation of conflict between public and private interests by building consensus to include the participation of stakeholders and civil society in formulating and implementing policies, thereby ensuring their legitimacy. Models of governance have particular relevance in the context of estuaries, because of the complexity associated with them.

Due to the lengthy historic land use by humans and the climate change characterized by warming and drying, the Loess Plateau has been plagued by ecosystem degradation for a long time. A series of ecological conservation projects launched since the 1970s altered the land use pattern greatly, and exerted a profound influence on the ecosystem services.

We address the possible outcomes of combining environmental taxes and environmental planning in managing non-renewable resources such as aggregates. We empirically investigate resource taxation issues by focusing on aggregate extraction policy in two large northern Italian regions, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. The evidence shows that environmental planning, in addition to economic instruments, is needed to shape and monitor environmental policies. We highlight that the complementarity of land use planning and economic instruments can be a key driver of sustainability performances.

Advocates have long claimed that a regional land use planning approach achieves gains in equity, efficiency, and environmental protect, but few studies have empirically tested these claims. In this case study of a regional planning process in a weak mandate state, we find that the regional plan would have produced better land use outcomes, but its impact was severely limited by political conflicts at the county level, a recession that necessitated cuts to non-mandated services, and a lack of state leadership around regional planning.

This short field work report gives an overview of the forest inventory work done during the first two years of The Future Okavango (TFO) project, a project implemented till 2015 and funded by the

German Ministry of Education and Research. TFO aims to integrate ecosystem functions and services into an ecological and economic approach to sustainable land management at a regional scale.

In the context of Knowledge for Climate programme, an expert pool was requested from Theme 6 (high quality climate projections) to provide data and information to study the future impacts of climate change on the agricultural land-use patterns in the Netherlands. More specifically, a number of questions were posed in regard to: 1) representing and explaining the spatial distribution of different types of farming; and 2) simulating with Land Use Scanner the future developments of agricultural land-use while taking into account effects of climate change and changes in (agricultural) policy.