I n the wake of the worst financial crisis since 1930, many countries face the challenge of creating a new economy model that relies less on financial services but more on production. Science therefore plays an increasingly important role to generate the knowledge that will eventually give rise to these new products. This coincides with the grand challenges of the 21 century: dealing with the e...

Kenya over the last few decades, and the change from a nomadic lifestyle to communally owned ranches, wildlife in the Samburu District is under threat from deforestation, land degradation, overgrazing by livestock, and unsustainable water use. Alexander Njue, who is also involved in a separate Earthwatchsponsored project studying the wildlife habitats in this area, hopes that wildlife can also ...

Defining historic grazing pressures and rangeland management is vital if early landscape threshold crossing and long–term trajectories of landscape change are to be properly understood. In this paper we use a new environmental simulation model, Búmodel, to assess two contrasting historical grazing landscapes in Mývatnssveit Iceland for two key periods—the colonization period (ca. Landnám, A.D. ...

Environmental inquiries constitute an important activity in the cultural ecological analysis of the interrelationship of productive technology and the local environment at HesbAn ( LaBianca 1976 ) . Cumulative and systematic study of the flora at Hesbbn can ultimately reveal information about ( 1) the prevailing soil and climatic conditions; ( 2 ) the nature of the local botanical association a...

Soil erosion is a complex phenomenon which combines the deterioration of their surface layers and the movement of the eroded materials that make it up. It is a constant issue for foresters, in particular in the management of new or restored forests. In metropolitan France, we spontaneously think about the restoration of mountain terrains (RTM), implemented from 1860 to stabilise degraded mounta...

The biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted by the vegetation of a terrestrial ecosystem play a key role in both regional air quality and tropospheric chemistry. To describe the general emission properties of VOC of different plant functional groups (PFG) in a typical temperate grassland in Inner Mongolia, China, we randomly selected 175 plant species and measured the quantities of is...

Tongyu County in Northeast China is highly prone to land degradation due to its fragile physical settings characterized by a flat topography, a semi-arid climate, and a shallow groundwater table. This study aims to determine the causes of land degradation through detecting the long-term trend of land cover changes. Degraded lands were mapped from satellite images recorded in 1992 and 2002. Thes...

Competitive behavior has often been presented as the ultimate engine of economic, technological, and scientific progress. Since all such progress is likely to imply some measure of social benefit, competition has been widely praised in modern western culture. However, competition can have very negative effects on social wellbeing. An early example is known as the "tragedy of the commons." The c...

In this review, the author discusses how pastoralism, and its many constituent components, is increasingly being recognised as in tune with the changing political and ecological nature of rangelands. He describes ways in which the literature reflects this changing attitude, outlines how rangelands respond to changes in climate and explores the evolving use of livestock resources. In addition, h...