Urban planners are increasingly interested in agriculture around cities and have to decide whether to maintain or not areas of agricultural land use within and close to growing cities. There is therefore a need for researchers to design tools to guide public decision-making on land use. Various approaches, originating from different disciplines, may be adopted in this respect. We designed an interdisciplinary research program in order to test two related concepts: the “sustainability” and the “multi-functionality” of agriculture.

Soil erosion by water is currently one of the most notable types of land degradation in Samanalawewa Watershed in Sri Lanka, creating copious environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Thus, with the aim of detecting and mapping the rates of human-induced soil erosion in the watershed, remote sensing and geographic information system based modelling and field experiments were carried out.

Land degradation and their restoration are emerging issues all over the world for the environmental management. In this study, degraded sodic land was rehabilitated through afforestation and cropping for 50years.

In developing countries, forests play an important role in supplying goods and services. These ecosystems are under many stresses due to unsustainable management practices, lack of clarity on tenure and access rights, and persistent pressure for land-use change. Climate change is exacerbating the impact of these stresses on both forest ecosystems and forest dependent people. What are the current forest coping strategies of different livelihoods? What is the role of forest ecosystems in increasing the resilience of rural communities?

The practice of raising cattle in the Amazon has been connected to deforestation, which has been especially intense in the Eastern Amazonian state of Pará that contained 23% of new rural settlements before 2008. The settlements were part of a program of land reform that allowed farmers to receive public credit. Public credit aims to increase production and incorporation of new technologies by settled farmers, which can lead to a decrease in pressure on forested areas.

A reconstruction of land use changes and the implications thereof for landslide occurrence on critical slopes of Mount Elgon in Eastern Uganda were undertaken. Aerial photographs taken in 1960 formed the benchmark for the analysis of respective land use changes between 1995 and 2006, using 30m Landsat TM and 20m SPOT MS images. Landslide sites were mapped using a MobileMapper, and terrain parameters were derived using a 15m Digital Elevation Model.

This study analyzed the financial attractiveness of Clean Development Mechanism Afforestation and Reforestation (CDM A/R) in irrigated agricultural settings. The Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of CDM A/R were estimated by analyzing the case of Khorezm region in Uzbekistan, where a mixed-species tree plantation was established on marginal cropland. The dual purposes of carbon sequestration and production of fruits, leaves as fodder, and fuelwood were studied over a seven-year rotation period.

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) has been widely promoted as an effective and efficient model for conservation; however, few studies have empirically examined how the market-based approach interacts with farmer's decision-making processes and their abilities to sustain new conservation practices. This paper examines the sustainability of a PES silvopastoral programme in Colombia from peasant farmers’ perspectives.

Reduced tillage is said to be one of the potential ways to reverse land degradation and ultimately increase the productivity of degrading soils of Africa. We hypothesised that crop yield following a modest application of 2 t ha⁻¹ of crop residue in a reduced tillage system is similar to the yield obtained from a conventional tillage system, and that incorporation of legumes in a cropping system leads to greater economic benefits as opposed to a cropping system involving continuous maize.

This paper presents an assessment of smallholder farmers’ perceptions of climate change, its impacts on agricultural production and adaptive responses in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The findings show that increased temperature and decreased rainfall are widely held perceptions; all respondents stated that they had observed increase in temperature and decrease in annual and seasonal rainfall amounts.

It is necessary to estimate the area of afforestation and deforestation in New Zealand, since 1990, to meet reporting obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. We describe a method for national mapping of forest change that achieves high accuracy, but only requires moderate effort. A national coverage of satellite imagery is standardised, classified (automatically) for land cover, and then compared with an existing 1990 land-use map to identify polygons (>1ha) of possible forest change. Each one of these possible change polygons is checked by operators for actual or spurious change.

In light of impending water and arable land shortages, population growth and climate change, it is more important than ever to examine how forest tree domestication can be accelerated to sustainably meet future demands for wood, biomass, paper, fuel and biomaterials. Because of long breeding cycles, tree domestication cannot be rapidly achieved through traditional genetic improvement methods alone. Integrating modern genetic and genomic techniques with conventional breeding will expedite tree domestication.