Farmland preservation is a national issue in modern China. Most studies have focused on farmland preservation policies in the agricultural, commercial and financial industries but have devoted relatively little attention to land use planning. Land use planning is crucial for farmland preservation. This paper selected Dachang County, a typical rural county bordering Beijing, as the study area an...

Arresting land degradation in impoverished rural environments is a global priority. Restoration ecology provides a promising framework, but it will need to be modified when applied to a rural development setting. There is a need for increased understanding of social dynamics in land restoration, however few systematic studies exist. This paper explores the social factors influencing restoration...

The global demand for agricultural products is surging due to population growth, more meat-based diets, and the increasing role of bioenergy. Three strategies can increase agricultural production: (1) expanding agriculture into natural ecosystems; (2) intensifying existing farmland; or (3) recultivating abandoned farmland. Because agricultural expansion entails substantial environmental trade-o...

analysis on both sides of the management/ research fence in a federal land-management agency in areas of wildlife and ecosystem conservation (e.g., Marcot et al. 2006). I can attest that this classical risk-management framework, as applied to public land and natural resource management, just doesn’t work as portrayed in the textbooks. Here’s why, and here are some practical opportunities for mo...

the main factors affecting environmental sensitivity to degradation are soil, vegetation, climate and management, through either their intrinsic characteristics or by their interaction on the landscape. different levels of degradation risks may be observed in response to particular combinations of the aforementioned factors. for instance, the combination of inappropriate management practices a...

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and its sister conventions, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, all aim to halt or mitigate the deterioration of the ecological processes on which life depends. Sustainable land management (SLM) is fundamental to achieving the goals of all three Conventions. Changes in land ...

Federal land managers are faced with the task of balancing multiple uses and goals when making decisions about land use and the activities that occur on public lands. Though climate change is now well recognized by federal agencies and their local land and resource managers, it is not yet clear how issues related to climate change will be incorporated into on-the-ground decision making within t...

This paper describes a new computing paradigm known as a problem solving environment ~PSE!, explores the role this new paradigm might play in watershed management and land use change analysis, and compares PSEs to similar technologies such as decision support systems and geographic information systems. A prototypical watershed management PSE organizes and unifies the diverse collection of softw...

This paper identifies new ways of moving from land degradation towards sustainable land management through the development of economic mechanisms. It identifies new mechanisms to tackle land degradation based on retaining critical levels of natural capital whilst basing livelihoods on a wider range of ecosystem services. This is achieved through a case study analysis of the Kalahari rangelands ...

Previous studies suggest that management intensity zoning systems, such as the triad approach, could allow Canada’s forest industry to maintain or increase timber harvest levels while simultaneously reducing its environmental impact. In most such studies, the zones are exogenously specified. In this study, we use a linear programming model to endogenously allocate forest land to management inte...