The combined output of LADAMER should be a comprehensive as well as spatially explicit image of land degradation effects and associated processes for the relevant European Mediterranean countries, in particular for the prototype region of the Iberian Peninsula. It will hence serve as a kind of integrating project between former research approaches and ongoing monitoring and assessment efforts. ...

Land is a nexus for crucial societal and environmental challenges including food security, access to water, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Development of solutions to balance these tradeoffs and synergies is currently hindered by the lack of theories explaining the conditions under which different pathways of land change occur and lead to different outcomes, integratin...

We analyzed potential land degradation processes in semiarid regions worldwide using long time series of remote sensing images and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the period 1981 to 2011. The objectives of the study were to identify semiarid regions showing a marked decrease in potential vegetation activity, indicative of the occurrence of land degradation processes, and t...

balance among different fractions of a carbon sources is of paramount importance in maintenance of very important in soil quality and environmental health. on the other hand, rapid growth of world population, degradation of agricultural soils, along with release of greenhouse gasses are some of the main challenges of the 21st century. the aim of this study was to investigate the extent of chang...

Agricultural crops take up water, but not salt, and evaporation from irrigated land does likewise. The result is increasing salt levels in soils. Just as cities cannot ignore urban wastewater collection and treatment, irrigating farmers and irrigation districts cannot ignore what to do with the salt in agricultural drainage water. Although salt management techniques can seem straightforward, th...

Ammonia-oxidizers play a key role in nitrification, which is important for nitrogen cycling and soil function. However, little is known about how vegetation successions and agricultural practices caused by human activities impact the ammonia-oxidizers and nitrification process. Putative ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) communities under different land utilization patterns of r...

Land degradation is becoming one of the severest environmental issues in the world, especially in developing nations. Land degradation, usually accompanied by soil erosion, always results in a decrease or complete loss of land productivity, and produces on-site and off-site pollution to soil and water. The methods for land reclamation are various, including physical, chemical and biological. Th...

Previous field research on the Horqin Sandy Land (China), which has suffered from severe desertification during recent decades, revealed how land use on a sand-dune topography affects both land degradation and restoration. This study aimed to depict the spatial distribution of local land use in order to shed more light on previous field findings regarding policies on a broader scale. We perform...