This paper identifies sixteen cases of large-scale actions in the agriculture and forestry sectors that have adaptation and/or mitigation outcomes, and distils lessons from the cases.

This special issue focuses on terrestrial biogeochemical cycles and their roles in determining current continental-scale budgets and future trends in biogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) for North America.

Besides India, there are a few other countries like Mexico, Spain, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China which also make intensive use of groundwater. This highlight reviews groundwater institutions and policies in these countries, with a special focus on the interlinkages between energy and groundwater.

The spatio-temporal distribution of land cover provides fundamental data for global climate and environmental change research. In recent decades, five global land cover maps have been produced based on remote sensing data sources and methodologies.

Urban trees can potentially mitigate environmental degradation accompanying rapid urbanisation via a range of tree benefits and services. But uncertainty exists about the extent of tree benefits and services because urban trees also impose costs (e.g. asthma) and may create hazards (e.g. windthrow).

Liu, X., Burras, C. L., Kravchenko, Y. S., Duran, A., Huffman, T., Morras, H., Studdert, G., Zhang, X., Cruse, R. M. and Yuan, X. 2012. Overview of Mollisols in the world: Distribution, land use and management. Can. J. Soil Sci. 92: 383–402. Mollisols – a.k.a., Black Soils or Prairie Soils – make up about 916 million ha, which is 7% of the world's ice-free land surface.

Climate change and recurrent drought in many of the world's dry places continue to inspire the search for economically attractive measures to conserve water. This study analyzes water conservation practices in irrigated agriculture in a sub-basin in North America's Rio Grande.

Public land management across North America now incorporates multiple ecological and social values and has led to use of increasingly complex silvicultural systems, such as those designed to emulate natural disturbance regimes, in an effort to manage for this wider variety of objectives.

Many deer populations in Europe and North America have increased in abundance over the last decades. The increasing populations potentially entail both ecological and economic challenges and opportunities, but in practice we still know little about the extent to which these opportunities are being exploited in different management systems.

Perennial coolwater streams (maximum daily mean water temperature 20.7–24.6°C; 90th percentile annual exceedence flow≥0.0283m³/s) are common in the Laurentian Great Lakes region of North America, including the state of Wisconsin, but they lack specific and effective bioassessment tools.