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MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
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Displaying 1261 - 1265 of 1524Identification of Arable Marginal Lands under Rainfed Conditions for Bioenergy Purposes in Spain
The cultivation of bioenergy crops could be considered as sustainable; however, its use in fertile lands could conflict with food production. The general purpose of this study is to identify areas where traditional food crops are not economically sustainable, but where they could be substituted by energy crops without changing the land use in Spain. We studied the profit margin of the main crops of the country, which are wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), the spatial location of the growing areas, and the biophysical constraints.
Application of Cloud Model to Evaluation of Forest Soil Fertility: A Case in Chinese Fir Plantations in Southern China
Soil nutrients are of great significance for maintaining forest growth and ensuring land productivity. A comprehensive scientific evaluation of soil fertility is helpful for sustainable forest management. There are many uncertainties in traditional evaluation methods, that is fuzziness and randomness, which often lead to a large deviation of the evaluation results. In order to comprehensively consider the fuzziness and randomness of soil fertility evaluation, the cloud model was introduced to evaluate the soil fertility of Chinese fir plantations.
Large-Scale Grain Producers’ Application of Land Conservation Technologies in China: Correlation Effects and Determinants
The quality of cultivated land has been seriously degraded due to the overuse of chemical fertilizer in China. Land conservation technologies (LCTs) have been proven to effectively address land degradation and improve land productivity. In this study, a multivariate probit model is applied to empirically analyze the correlation effects and determinants of the application of LCTs application using cross-sectional data collected on 690 large-scale grain producers from the Jiangsu and Jiangxi provinces in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Economic Efficiency and Its Influencing Factors on Urban Agglomeration—An Analysis Based on China’s Top 10 Urban Agglomerations
Economic efficiency is the key issue of sustainable development in urban agglomerations. To date, more attention has been paid to the estimates of productivity gains from urban agglomerations. Differing from the previous studies, this paper focuses on the influencing factors and mechanisms of the economic efficiency of urban agglomerations, and check the effects of three different externalities (industrial specialization, industrial diversity and industrial competition) on the economic efficiency of urban agglomerations.
Spatial Shift of Aridity and Its Impact on Land Use of Syria
Expansion of arid lands due to climate change, particularly in water stressed regions of the world can have severe implications on the economy and people’s livelihoods. The spatiotemporal trends in aridity, the shift of land from lower to higher arid classes and the effect of this shift on different land uses in Syria have been evaluated in this study for the period 1951–2010 using high-resolution monthly climate data of the Terrestrial Hydrology Research Group of Princeton University.