Land use change, natural disturbance, and climate change directly alter ecosystem productivity and carbon stock level. The estimation of ecosystem carbon dynamics depends on the quality of land cover change data and the effectiveness of the ecosystem models that represent the vegetation growth processes and disturbance effects. We used the Integrated Biosphere Simulator (IBIS) and a set of 30- to 60-m resolution fire and land cover change data to examine the carbon changes of California's forests, shrublands, and grasslands.

Concerns about climate change and water quality make it necessary to have a better understanding of the cycling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) within landscapes. In New Zealand, pastoral farming on hill country is a major land use, and there is little information available at a landscape level on the cycling of C and N within these systems, particularly the impacts of land use intensification.

Salinization of irrigated agricultural land threatens ecological sustainability and livelihoods of people. Salinization is especially severe in the dry lowlands world-wide and in Central Asia where large amounts of salts accumulated in the soil profile, originating from shallow saline groundwater (GW).

Rain-use efficiency (RUE; the ratio of vegetation productivity to annual precipitation) has been suggested as a measure for assessing land degradation in arid/semi-arid areas. In the absence of anthropogenic influence, RUE has been reported to be constant over time, and any observed change may therefore be attributed to non-rainfall impacts. This study presents an analysis of the decadal time-scale changes in the relationship between a proxy for vegetation productivity (ΣNDVI) and annual rainfall in the Sahel-Sudanian zone of Africa.

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.

Much information on restoration and management exists for wet tropical forests of Central America but comparatively little work has been done in the dry forests of this region. Such information is critical for reforestation efforts that are now occurring throughout Central America. This paper describes processes of degradation due to land use and provides a conceptual framework for the restoration of dry tropical forest. Most of this forest type was initially harvested for timber and then cleared for cattle in the last century (1930–1970).

Questions: Can the climatic adaptive capacity of natural ecosystems be estimated with using landscape indicators based on vegetation or land-cover data? Can species distribution model (SDM) outputs be enhanced using such indicators? What are the data requirements and optimal parameter values of potential indicators? Location: Indicator framework: unspecified. Case study: Kiskunság, Hungary. Methods: (1) We define a general framework for handling adaptation in ecological climate change impact assessments based on IPCC definitions.

Over the last decade, hundreds of payments for ecosystem services (PES) programmes have been initiated around the world, but evidence of their environmental benefits remains limited. In this study, two PES programmes operating in the municipality of Coatepec (Mexico) were evaluated to assess their effectiveness in protecting the region's endangered upland forests. Landsat satellite data were analysed to assess changes in forest cover before and after programme implementation using a difference-in-differences estimator.

Solid waste management is a worldwide problem and it is becoming more and more complicated day by day due to rise in population, industrialization as well as changes in our life style. Presently most of the waste generated is either disposed of in an open dump in developing countries or in landfills in the developed ones. Landfilling as well as open dumping requires lot of land mass and could also result in several environmental problems.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a major indicator of the impact of climate change and human activity, particularly in the Sahel, where the land cover has changed greatly over the past 50 years. Aerial and satellite sensors have been taking images of the Earth's surface for several decades. These data have been widely used to monitor LUCC, but many questions remain concerning what type of pre-processing should be carried out on image resolutions and which methods are most appropriate for successfully mapping patterns and dynamics in both croplands and natural vegetation.

In this paper is presented a methodological approach which integrates statistic modelling and 2-D cellular automata (CA) in order to describe tree species shifts responding to the climate changes foreseen for Italy in the 21st century. Five Italian tree species populations of Abies alba, Pinus sylvestris, Fagus sylvatica, Acer campestris and Quercus suber and their actual potential distributions (PDs) – represented by Importance Value (IV), have been considered.

The introduction to this set of papers highlights four challenges to the large-scale analysis of population growth at protected area edges in Africa and Latin America undertaken by George Wittemyer and colleagues in their 2008 paper published in Science. First, it raises questions about their sampling procedures, given national-level variation in systems of protected area designation and protected area estates. Second, it challenges the largely economic model of migration decisions that underlies their analysis.