Land and water institutions play a vital role in managing and sustaining land and water resources as well as enhancing economic development and poverty alleviation efforts. While a lot has been done in terms of understanding the micro-determinants of farmers decisions in land and water conservation, there is little attempt to understand the broad macro-institutional and organizational issues that influence land and water management decisions.

The Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004 ended nearly four decades of water disputes between the Gila River Indian Community and the state of Arizona. This paper explores the historical background of the Gila River Indian Community and its claim to water rights, the evolution of tribal water rights laws that culminated in the historic settlement, and the consequences of the act on water resource management in the region. It also links the findings from this case to the broader field of indigenous water rights studies from other regions of the world.

Soil and water resources are among natural wealth of a country and are main components of agriculture that meet food requirement. Development, protection and management of the soil and water resources have become a necessity today. Required investments should be made on improvement of water resources to develop the region in terms of agriculture. This study, examining previous studies on soil and water resources in Kırsehir and problems faced and solutions for these problems provides preliminary information on future studies.

The significance of nutrient inputs at the watershed scale is best expressed in terms of in-stream processes, compared to evaluating simple field measurements of nutrient inputs. Modeling tools are necessary to consider the complexity of river networks in the determination of the sources and processes by which nutrients are transported at the watershed scale.

Water resource conservation is of utmost importance, especially for agriculture in developing countries. Frequent occurrences of water shortage have driven more social efforts in researching on water resources spatial distribution, as the land cover changes recently have shown positive influences. For the purpose of efficient water resources management, hydrological processes under different types of land covers and soil textures are supposed to be accurately analyzed and evaluated.

The flow of chemical materials along spatial elements is a fundamental aspect of landscape ecology. The research renders indicators for water pollution, which are utile for functional water management and land use planning. Ecologists identify mechanisms of nutrients transfer and mitigate their environmental impacts using freshwater wetlands and riparian buffers. In order to estimate the N (nitrogen) and P (phosphorus) loss risk, current research combines indicators into index models.

Livestock-water productivity (LWP) refers to a set of innovations that could contribute towards reducing the amount of water needed per unit of output generated. But what does it take to get these ideas adopted by livestock keepers in crop-livestock systems? In this paper, we treat LWP as an innovation, and consider in what ways it may be introduced and/or developed among the crop-livestock agricultural systems by drawing on successful examples of change.

Salinity and drainage management options include source control, reuse, and evaporation ponds. This article identifies efficient strategies to maintain hydrologic balance in closed drainage basins and evaluates their impact on regional agricultural profits. Theoretical analysis suggests that economic efficiency requires acknowledgment of the nonseparability between water use and land value.

The river basin management approach in the Syr Darya basin fragmented after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. However, this approach had already created dependencies between riparian states, such as transboundary water control infrastructure. At the national level, these states hardly cooperate, but at the province and district level, especially in the Ferghana Valley, which is shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, cooperation continues. This paper analyzes transboundary cooperation in the Ferghana Valley.

The goods and services that lakes provide result from complex interactions between meteorology, hydrology, nutrient loads and in-lake processes. Hydrology and nutrient loads are, in turn, influenced by socio-economic factors such as human habitation, water abstraction and land-management, within their catchments. Models provide a means of linking these different domains and also of forecasting and evaluating the effects of different management scenarios on lakes.