Should farming and conservation policies aim broadly to separate land for nature and land for production (land sparing) or integrate production and conservation on the same land (wildlife-friendly farming)? Most studies that try to address this question suffer from flaws in sampling design, inappropriate metrics, and/or failure to measure biodiversity baselines. We discuss how these failings can be addressed, and what existing information tells us about the key debates on this topic. The evidence available suggests that trade-offs between biodiversity and yield are prevalent.

Despite decades of attention by conservationists, deforestation remains a critical problem in Latin America, particularly in agricultural frontiers like the Amazon and the lowlands of Central America. The limited impact of conservation initiatives in such regions stems partly from a poor understanding of the socioeconomic and land use dynamics that typify frontiers. Moreover, conservation organizations tend to disregard the economic and policy factors at various scales that contribute to deforestation pressures in developing countries.

Large-scale reclamation of arid land in North-western China over the past 50 years has converted the natural desert landscape into anthropogenic oasis, particularly in the lower part of watersheds. Drastic human activities may have caused the change of soil organic carbon (SOC) in anthropogenic oasis. This study employs the CENTURY model (Version 4.0) to investigate the effects of land reclamation and management practices in oasis agriculture on the dynamic of SOC at the lower part of Sangong river watershed, a typical anthropogenic oasis reclaimed at 50 years ago.

Environmental targets are often used in planning for sustainable agricultural landscapes but their impacts are rarely known. In this paper we introduce landscape futures analysis as a method which combines linear programming optimisation with scenario analysis in quantifying the environmental, economic, and social impacts associated with achieving environmental targets, on a landscape scale. We applied the technique in the Lower Murray in southern Australia.

The rainfall pattern in the Sahel is very erratic with a high spatial variability. We tested the often reported hypothesis that the dispersion of farmers' fields around the village territory helps mitigate agro-climatic risk by increasing yield stability from year to year. We also wished to evaluate whether this strategy had an effect on the yield disparity among households in a village. Based on a network of approximately 60 rain gauges spread over 500km² in the Fakara region (Southwest Niger), daily rainfall was interpolated at 300m×300m resolution over a 12-year period.

This paper analyses the land use/cover dynamics of land degradation through the interpretation of aerial photographs (1958 and 1980) and 2006 SPOT-5 satellite image of the Gerado catchment. Other, non-visual data were gathered from personal interview and focus group discussions conducted in 2010 and 2011 with local elders, farmers and development (agricultural extension) agents. The results identified the presence of cultivated and rural settlement land, shrubland, woodland, bare land, grassland, urban built up area and forest.

Following the national policy, the Department of Agriculture of Thailand has implemented a crop diversification program in several provinces of the country. This study, which was conducted in Nakhon Pathom Province, analyzed the extent of crop diversification and its determinants using primary information collected from 245 farm households using a structured questionnaire, and from selected farmer leaders and agricultural development officials. The study also assessed the effects of crop diversification on income and the inputs used.

In an era of global climate change, the agricultural sector faces the challenge of increasing the production of safe and nutritious food supplies to meet a growing world population while safeguarding the environment. Farmers will adapt their agricultural practices to a changing climate to safeguard against loss of production and to take advantage of any positive climatic conditions.

This study investigates how sustainability and its inherent values figure into farmers' discourse, i.e., how farmers and members of farming communities talk about sustainability. We conducted qualitative interviews of various individuals in a single Iowa community to determine whether the visions guiding their land management choices resembled at all the ideals of a sustainable agriculture. Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of identification and division, we rhetorically analyzed the interview transcripts.

Planners have long been interested in understanding ways in which land use planning approaches play out on the ground and planning scholars have approached the task of evaluating such effects using a variety of methods. Oregon, in particular, has been the focus of numerous studies owing to its early-adopted and widely recognized statewide approach to farm and forest land protection and recent experiment with relaxation of that approach in 2004 with the passage of ballot Measure 37.

For EU-Mediterranean olive groves (Olea europaea), mapped in CORINE, classes of olive farming intensities were derived from the outcome of a multi-temporal remote sensing vegetation dynamics analysis. The management intensity classes were developed in view of a differentiated accounting of olive groves when delineating High Nature Value Farmland areas (HNV) at pan-European level. The remote sensing input data used was the Green Vegetation Fraction (GVF), derived in 10-day intervals from a long-term time series of NOAA AVHRR data.

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.