Excessive nutrients transported from the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) have created a hypoxic zone within the Gulf of Mexico, with numerous negative ecological effects. Furthermore, federal expenditures on agricultural conservation practices have received intense scrutiny in recent years. Partly driven by these factors, the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of nutrient sources and delivery to the Gulf.

Modern agriculture suffers from its dependence on chemical inputs and subsequent impacts on health and environment. Alternatively, protecting crops against pests can be achieved through the reinforcement of regulation ecological services. Our work propounds a data-driven methodological framework to derive relevant agricultural landscape rearrangements enhancing populations of beneficial organisms regulating pests.Building on spatialised entomological and geographic data, we developed a parsimonious reaction–diffusion model describing the population dynamics of beneficial organisms.

Land means the basic part of the natural environment, the basic instrument of human life, activity and immovable property, which is being disposed of in the process of land relation. Land should be used when coordinating private and public interests as well as environment protection requirements.

This study explored the health, well-being, and social capital benefits gained by community members who are involved in the management of land for conservation in six rural communities across Victoria. A total of 102 people participated in the study (64 males; 38 females) comprising 51 members of a community-based land management group and 51 controls matched by age and gender. Mixed methods were employed, including the use of an adapted version of Buckner’s (1988) Community Cohesion Scale.

Understanding soil water content, θ, variability is important for monitoring and modeling of land surface processes as well as land and water management practices. With regards to in situ θ probes, it is sometimes assumed that a single local measurement can represent the larger domain, mostly for practical reasons. But there is a substantial amount of variability in θ at the field scale.

Wars, drought and social collapse have greatly impaired land management and agriculture production systems in the southeastern Afghanistan provinces of Khost, Paktika and Paktya. This region has long existed with limited central government influence and remains particularly unstable. A complex physical and social geography, on-going warfare, severely limited mobility and policies poorly adapted to regional realities hamper development and reconstruction.

Desertification, which affects more than two-thirds of the world's arid and semi-arid regions, is a significant global ecological and environmental problem. There is a strong link between desertification of the drylands and emission of CO₂ from soil and vegetation to the atmosphere. The Horqin Sandy Land is a severely desertified area in China's agro-pastoral ecotone due to its fragile ecology, combined with unsustainable land management.

An assessment of sensitivity to land degradation has been carried out in the Extremadura region, SW Spain, by means of a modelling approach developed by the European Commission funded MEDALUS project (Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use) which identifies such areas on the basis of an index (Environmentally Sensitive Area index, ESA index) that incorporates data on environmental quality (climate, vegetation, soil) as well as anthropogenic factors (management).

Land use and land cover changes in the Brazilian Amazon have major implications for regional and global carbon (C) cycling. Cattle pasture represents the largest single use (about 70%) of this once-forested land in most of the region. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the RothC and Century models at estimating soil organic C (SOC) changes under forest-to-pasture conditions in the Brazilian Amazon. We used data from 11 site-specific 'forest to pasture' chronosequences with the Century Ecosystem Model (Century 4.0) and the Rothamsted C Model (RothC 26.3).