The sub-Saharan Africa region recorded the fastest conversion of forest land to agriculture in the past 20 years. The region also has the widest yield gap and together with Latin America and Caribbean has the largest unused arable land. However, there are wide variations across countries and this offers valuable lessons on the drivers of agricultural intensification and land use dynamics. This ...

[1] A geographically explicit terrestrial carbon cycle component of the Integrated Science Assessment Model (ISAM) is used to examine the response of plant and soil carbon stocks to historical changes in cropland land cover, atmospheric CO2, and climate. The ISAM model is forced with two different land cover change data sets for cropland: one spatially resolved set based on cropland statistics ...

To prevent environmental degradation, China’s central government launched the “Grain for Green Project” (GGP) in 1999. Since its beginning, the effects and influences of the GGP have been hotly debated among domestic and international scholars and policymakers. This paper is taking the County of Yanchuan in the Loess Plateau as a case study, examines the spatio-temporal patterns of cropland con...

[1] Groundwater recharge is critical in semiarid regions where aquifers are currently being mined for intensive irrigation. Land use management related to agriculture can be used to control partitioning of water near the land surface and to potentially manage water resources. The purpose of this study was to quantify impacts of deep plowing in rainfed (nonirrigated) agriculture in a semiarid re...

The purpose of this study was identifying rangeland development andrestoration operations targets. This study was conducted in Hossein Abad Bazoft basinwith 7162 ha area, located in south east of Farsan County, Chaharmahal and BakhtiariProvince, Iran. The basin has various land uses including rangeland, forest, irrigated farmand garden, dry farm, residential area and rock mass. In this study, d...

[1] In 2000–2002, three rangeland and six irrigated sites were instrumented to assess the storage and transit time of chemicals in thick (15 to 50 m) unsaturated zones (UZ) in the High Plains. These processes are likely to influence relations between land use and groundwater quality, yet they have not been documented systematically in the High Plains. Land use and climate were important control...

Environmental transformations are the results of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes. This study aims to investigate LULC changes associated factors in Este District northwestern Ethiopia, for last four decades (the 1980s 2020s). The classes were analyzed using supervised classification techniques ERDASS IMAGINE 2015 ArcGIS 10.3.1, categorizing Landsat satellite images 1984, 2000, 2018 into ...

17 The impact of future land use and land cover changes (LULCC) on regional and global 18 climate is one of the most challenging aspects of understanding anthropogenic climate change. 19 We study the impacts of LULCC on regional climate in the southeastern U.S. by 20 downscaling the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global climate model E to 21 the regional scale using a spectral ...