This study examines the causes and consequences of gully erosion, as perceived by the local people of Dangara area, Nigeria. The study particularly seeks to explore the local people’s perceptions of gully erosion and how it affects crop, settlement development, crop yields, land ownership and values, rural economics and private conservation investments in Dangara area of Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory. It is based on analysis of data collected using questionnaires administered to 346 respondents in the area.

Urbanization alters watershed ecosystem functioning, including nutrient budgets and processes of nutrient retention. It is unknown, however, how variation in stormwater infrastructure design affects the delivery of water and materials from urban watersheds. In this study, we asked: (1) How does stormwater infrastructure design vary over time and space in an arid city (Phoenix, Arizona, USA)?, and (2) How does variation in infrastructure design affect fluxes of dissolved nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and organic carbon (DOC) from urban watershed ecosystems?

CONTEXT: Expansion of bioenergy production is part of a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. Dedicated biomass crops will compete with other land uses as most high quality arable land is already used for agriculture, urban development, and biodiversity conservation. OBJECTIVE: First, we explore the trade-offs between converting land enrolled in the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to switchgrass for biofuel production or preserving it for biodiversity.

CONTEXT: Land-use change is a global phenomenon with potential to generate abrupt spatial changes in species’ distributions. OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether theory about the internal structure of bird species’ geographic ranges can be refined to reflect abrupt changes in distribution and abundance associated with human influences on landscapes, and whether the prevalence and diversity of bird–landscape threshold relationships may significantly complicate assemblage-level avian conservation.

The National Wildlife Refuge System is the world’s largest network of lands set aside specifically for wildlife conservation. For refuge planners and managers tasked with maintaining ecological integrity and wildlife habitat, many uncertainties exist. In forests in the Upper Midwest, for instance, exotic earthworms are impacting ecosystem structure and function, but their community composition and effects on refuges is unknown.

Many avian species persist in human‐dominated landscapes; however, little is known about the demographic consequences of urbanization in these populations. Given that urban habitats introduce novel benefits (e.g., anthropogenic resources) and pressures (e.g., mortality risks), conflicting mechanisms have been hypothesized to drive the dynamics of urban bird populations. Top‐down processes such as predation predict reduced survivorship in suburban and urban habitats, whereas bottom‐up processes, such as increased resource availability, predict peak survival in suburban habitats.

Stream water temperature (tₛ) is a critical water quality parameter for aquatic ecosystems. However, tₛrecords are sparse or nonexistent in many river systems. In this work, we present an empirical model to predict tₛat the site scale across the USA. The model, derived using data from 171 reference sites selected from the Geospatial Attributes of Gages for Evaluating Streamflow database, describes the linear relationship between monthly mean air temperature (tₐ) and tₛ.

Over the past few decades, groundwater has become an essential commodity owing to increased demand as a result of growing population, industrialization, urbanization and so on. The water supply situation is expected to become more severe in the future because of continued unsustainable water use and projected change in hydrometeorological parameters due to climate change.

Satellite remote sensing has become a popular tool to analyze agricultural drought through terrestrial vegetation health conditions using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Drought monitoring techniques using remote sensing-based drought indices assume that vegetation conditions vary year-to-year due to prevailing weather conditions (e.g., precipitation and temperature), and current conditions are evaluated based on the deviation from the long-term statistics such as mean, minimum, or maximum.

During the last few decades, land use changes have largely affected the global warming process through emissions of CO₂. However, C sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems could contribute to the decrease of atmospheric CO₂rates. Although Mediterranean areas show a high potential for C sequestration, only a few studies have been carried out in these systems. In this study, we propose a methodology to assess the impact of land use and land cover change dynamics on soil organic C stocks at different depths.

Fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) is the major air pollutant in Beijing, posing serious threats to human health. Land use regression (LUR) has been widely used in predicting spatiotemporal variation of ambient air-pollutant concentrations, though restricted to the European and North American context. We aimed to estimate spatiotemporal variations of PM₂.₅by building separate LUR models in Beijing. Hourly routine PM₂.₅measurements were collected at 35 sites from 4th March 2013 to 5th March 2014.

We conducted extensive mist netting and radio tracking of common frugivorous, seed-dispersing, and tropical forest-dwelling blue-crowned manakins (Lepidothrix coronata; BCMA) and white-ruffed manakins (Corapipo altera; WRMA) to study their habitat use, movements, breeding success, and seed dispersal potential in the fragmented landscape of southern Costa Rica. We obtained 1354 GPS locations from 20 BCMAs and 4040 GPS locations from 54 WRMAs we tracked. These birds were dependent on forest remnants and rarely moved through open habitats.