The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of existing policies, programmes and legislation in promoting sustainable land management and livelihoods in mid‐central Botswana. The paper is based on data from the survey of relevant literature, analysis of policy and legal documents, field observations and a series of stakeholder workshops held in the villages of Mopipi, Mokobaxane and Rakops in Boteti Sub‐District between 2008 and 2009.

Socio-economic changes threaten nomadic pastoralism across the world, changing traditional grazing patterns. Such land-use changes will co-occur with climate change, and while both are potentially important determinants of future ecosystem functioning, interactions between them remain poorly understood. We investigated the effects of grazing by large herbivores and climate manipulation using open-top chambers (OTCs) on flower number and flowering species richness in mountain steppe of northern Mongolia.

AIM: New conservation approaches that account for broad‐scale ecological processes must underpin decisions about conservation planning in the world's remaining wilderness areas. Our goal is to make the relevant tools and methods that have been developed by conservation scientists accessible to conservation practitioners working towards wilderness preservation. LOCATION: Wilderness areas, in particular the North American boreal region.

Game changers to achieve sustainable intensification of agriculture are possible in the irrigation sector and they focus mainly on getting more with less. There is, however, still a long way to go to replicate, adapt and develop approaches to take such ideas to scale and increase productivity within existing agricultural water management contexts.

In a previous article, Beschta et al. (2013) argue that grazing by large ungulates (both native and domestic) should be eliminated or greatly reduced on western public lands to reduce potential climate change impacts. The authors were selective in their use of the scientific literature, and their publication is more of an opinion article than a synthesis. Their conclusions do not reflect the complexities associated with herbivore grazing. Interactions of climate change and grazing will depend on the specific situation.

Currently, there is a major concern about the future of nutrient loads discharged into the Baltic Sea from Polish rivers because they are main contributors to its eutrophication. To date, no watershed-scale studies have properly addressed this issue. This paper fills this gap by using a scenario-modeling framework applied in the Reda watershed, a small (482� km²) agricultural coastal area in northern Poland. We used the SWAT model to quantify the effects of future climate, land cover, and management changes under multiple scenarios up to the 2050s.

Patterns of land-use and land-cover change are usually grouped into one of two categories defined by the dominant trend: (1) deforestation resulting from expanding agriculture and (2) forest expansion, usually related to the abandonment of marginal lands. At regional scale, however, both processes can occur simultaneously even in the absence of net change. Given the focus on net change, such redistribution of agricultural and natural and seminatural lands has been generally overlooked.

Current spatially explicit approaches to map and assess ecosystem services are often grounded on unreliable proxy data based on land use/cover to derive ecosystem service indicators. These approaches fail to make a distinction between the actual service provision and the underlying ecosystem capacity to provide the service. We present an integrative conceptual framework to estimate the provision of soil erosion prevention by combining the structural impact of soil erosion and the social–ecological processes that allow for its mitigation.

Freshwater ecosystems are warming globally from the direct effects of climate change on air temperature and hydrology and the indirect effects on near-stream vegetation. In fire-prone landscapes, vegetative change may be especially rapid and cause significant local stream temperature increases but the importance of these increases relative to broader changes associated with air temperature and hydrology are not well understood.

Hydrological and land use changes can affect species in human altered landscapes. Typically the impacts of hydrological and land use changes are examined separately, with hydrological determinants used to explain the distribution of species in water dependent and aquatic habitats and land use factors used to examine terrestrial species. However, given the connectedness of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, stressors originating in one domain may be important in the other.

Amazon ecosystem degradation profoundly impacts life supporting processes of global importance such as climate regulation, as well as local conditions for livelihoods. In Peru's highland jungle, an expanding deforestation front of forest conversion to agriculture has vastly transformed the landscape. Small–scale farming, the main driver of forest degradation, and consequently household natural resource management affect ecosystem functionality. To investigate farmers' attitudes and priorities to services provided by the ecosystems (ES) we interviewed 51 farmers, both local and colonists.

Environmental factors controlling the distribution and abundance of boreal avifauna are not fully understood, limiting our ability to predict the consequences of a changing climate and industrial development activities underway. We used a compilation of avian point‐count data, collected over 1990–2008 from nearly 36 000 locations, to model the abundance of individual forest songbird species within the Canadian boreal forest.