Over ten million people have been displaced from protected areas by conservation projects. Forced displacement in developing countries is a major obstacle to reducing poverty. It should no longer be considered a mainstream strategy for conservation and only applied in extreme cases following international standards.

Using the UNFCCC as a basis, and the objectives of estimating soil organic carbon (SOC) changes during the period 1900–2100, a spatially explicit database of climate, land cover and soil texture was compiled for a 262,000 km2 region in semi-arid Sudan. The area is characterized by low input cultivation of millet, sorghum and sesamé combined with livestock grazing. By integrating the database with the CENTURY ecosystem model, we were able to estimate historical, current and future pools of SOC as a function of land management and climate.

Poor millet growth and yields in Niger are commonly attributed to rainfall deficits and low soil nutrient content. Land management by local farmers is done as a function of soil types, crops, and available resources. Farmer management practices in millet fields located on four different landscape positions were studied in a village in western Niger located near the 600 mm isohyet. Average distance from homestead to field was 980 m, with fields in the valley bottom much closer (average 225 m) and fields on the plateau much further (average 2300 m).

Expert judgements are potentially a valuable source of information in land degradation assessment, especially in areas where data paucity impedes the use of quantitative models. However, expert opinions are also much disputed because they are not tested for consistency, abstain from formal documentation, while their quantitative interpretation is inherently unidentifiable. This paper evaluates and formalizes the use of expert judgements to conduct a nationwide water erosion hazard assessment in Ethiopia.

Fire was arguably the most important forest and rangeland disturbance process in the Inland Northwest United States for millennia. Prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition, fire regimes ranged from high severity with return intervals of one to five centuries, to low severity with fire-free periods lasting three decades or less. Indoamerican burning contributed to the fire ecology of grasslands and lower and mid-montane dry forests, especially where ponderosa pine was the dominant overstory species, but the extent of this contribution is difficult to quantify.

Queensland, Australia, has a proud pastoral history; however, the private and social benefits of continued woodland clearing for pasture development are unlikely to be as pronounced as they had been in the past. The environmental benefits of tree retention in arid regions of the State are now better appreciated and market opportunities have arisen for the unique timbers of western Queensland.

The Kalahari ecosystem is characterized by natural resource conflicts and land-use pressure resulting from intensification of human activities. This paper addresses three issues of concern associated with the Kalahari ecosystem resource management: (i) the major land-use/land cover shifts in the Kalahari ecosystem since 1970 and the resulting pattern in vegetation species composition, cover and density; (ii) the possible explanations for the observed shifts; and (iii) the possible resource conflicts likely to arise.

Extensive livestock farming systems in the Less Favored Areas (LFA) of the European Union (EU) are under social stress and requirement to adapt their production practices to new economic and social realities. This research argues that a restructuring plan for the cereal-sheep system of Castile-La Mancha may represent economic and ecological synergies. The potential implementation of a technical strategy (integrating cereal and sheep farming and increasing acreage of annual forage legumes) has been tested within a community-based research project carried out over three phases.

Using data from previous studies, we tested two hypotheses about the impacts of grazing in a naturally heterogeneous landscape in arid central Australia: (1) that grazing leads to net change of resources at a paddock or landscape scale, and (2) that water and nutrients remain coupled as they move through the landscape. We found that key nutrients were likely to be lost at the landscape scale as grazing increased, rather than just being redistributed. Water infiltration increased but runoff was probably lost more readily due to the lack of barriers to flow.

Apart from a decrease in total perennial plant cover, degradation of North-African arid lands is not easy to qualify. Yet, simple and comprehensive yardsticks are necessary to assess degradation. We assigned components of competitive ability (C), stress tolerance (S) and ruderality (R) to 15 common perennials of Presaharian Tunisia. We used for that purpose phyto-ecological studies, data about life-form, grazing value and demography and circumstantial data.

Degradation of the dry semiarid ecosystems in the Mu Us Sandy Land of north central China was explored using high-resolution satellite images from 1978, 1987 and 1996. This study monitored both changes in grassland biomass production and reclamation activities to detect the nature and scale of land degradation since major economic reforms were introduced in 1978. The position of the high-resolution images within the vegetation cycles was inspected from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) NDVI images at 10-day repetition and seasonal precipitation patterns.