Twenty years ago I completed my Master’s work in the Chaco forests of northern Argentina. The native forests are, in fact, rangelands. In addition to livestock grazing, there is timber extraction, wildlife harvest (think tegu lizard cowboy boots), and charcoal production. I took part in a project comparing biodiversity among production systems. A new system promised to reverse biodiversity loss and soil degradation. But it’s a moot point now since much of that forest has been cleared for cropland—the highest rate of tropical forest loss in the world.

Economic motivation for implementing targeted responses to rangeland degradation often lag the events that cause degradation and existing monitoring schemes often lack the sensitivity or the connections to ecological processes to reliably serve as a basis for evaluating success. In this paper, we present an approach for quantifying the relationship of economic output and land degradation during the intermediate stages of degradation. We also propose an approach that can provide enhanced incentives to implement proven responses before degradation processes are entrained.

Land abandonment is a major issue worldwide. In Argentina, the Monte Desert is the most arid rangeland, where the traditional conservation practices are based on successional management of areas excluded to disturbances or abandoned. Some areas subjected to this kind of management may be too degraded, and thus require active restoration. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess whether passive succession-based management is a suitable approach by evaluating the status of land degradation in a protected area after 17–41� years of farming abandonment.

Repetitive armed conflicts may be directly and indirectly responsible for severe biophysical modification to the environment. This, in turn, makes land more susceptible to degradation. Mapping and monitoring land degradation are essential for designing and implementing post-conflict recovery plans and informed policy decisions. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of repetitive armed conflicts on land degradation along the coastal zone of North Lebanon using multi-temporal satellite data.

The Yanqi Basin, one of the most productive agricultural areas, has a high population density in Xinjiang, Northwest China. Land use changes, mainly driven by oasis expansion, significantly impact ecosystem services and functions, but these effects are difficult to quantify. The valuation of ecosystem services is important to clarify the ecological and environmental changes caused by agriculturalization of oasis.

Land use practices and vegetation cover distribution are considered to be the most important dynamic factors that influence the land degradation or the soil erosion of a region. In this study, a Soil Protection Index (SPI) is defined as a function of land use practices and intensity of vegetation cover. This index is used to map the relative degree of protection of topsoil from being eroded by external effects such as rainfall and overland flow. A fuzzy rule‐based model integrated within ArcGIS® has been set‐up and tested with the aim to develop SPI maps.

The Mediterranean region covers about 854 million ha, but only 118 million (or 14 per cent) are suitable for agricultural production. In North Africa and the Middle East (MENA), agricultural land covers about 5 per cent; in Egypt and Algeria, it occupies less than 4 per cent and, in Libya, less than 2 per cent of the total national land area. Across the Mediterranean region land use divides between natural pastures/rangelands (ca. 15 per cent), forests and woodlands (ca. 8 per cent), with the ca.

This paper is a critical synthesis of the causes, effects and challenges of the Sahelian droughts. The results show that the four main causes of the Sahelian droughts are as follows: sea surface temperature changes, vegetation and land degradation, dust feedbacks and human-induced climate change. However, human-induced climate change is seen as the major drought-determining factor because it controls sea surface temperatures, dust feedbacks and vegetation degradation.

In the last decades, due to climate changes, soil deterioration and land use/land cover (LULC) changes, land degradation (LD) has become one of the most important issues at the global, regional and local scale. In concrete terms, LD determines a reduction in the productivity of a territory and in its capacity of providing ecosystem goods and services. “Syndromes” of LD can be assessed in the past, and scenarios, conversely, can be developed for the future, as information baselines for sustainable land management strategies and interventions.

Rapid urbanization together with policy ineffectiveness in controlling urban growth is often associated to soil and land degradation in both the developing and developed world. The present study analyses the relationship between urban expansion and soil degradation in an arid Mediterranean region (Attica, Greece) where the compact settlement pattern has been replaced by low‐density urban development. The study area is one of the most densely populated areas in the Mediterranean basin that has experienced an impressive growth in population during the last 60� yr.

To understand how shrub cover affects the spatiotemporal patterns of the soil seed bank and to assess the role of vegetation in the restoration of desertified land in a semi‐arid region of China, we investigated the species composition and seed density of the soil seed bank under and outside the canopies over two seasons for an age sequence of Caragana microphylla shrubs in the Horqin Sandy Land region, Inner Mongolia. The results showed that a total of 24 plant species seeds were present in the soil seed bank, of which 20 were annuals or biennials.

In many desert ecosystems vegetation is both patchy and dynamic: vegetated areas are interspersed with patches of bare ground, and both the positioning and the species composition of the vegetated areas exhibit change through time. These characteristics lead to the emergence of multi-scale patterns in vegetation that arise from complex relationships between plants, soils and transport processes.