Land use change is fundamentally a product of the interaction of physical land characteristics, economic considerations and agricultural and environmental policies. Researchers are increasingly combining physical and socio-economic spatial data to investigate the drivers of land-use change in relation to policy and economic developments. Focusing on Ireland, this study develops a panel data set...

Use of biofuels diminishes fossil fuel combustion, thereby also reducing net greenhouse gas emissions. However, subsidies are needed to make agricultural biofuel production economically feasible. To explore the economic potential of biofuels in a greenhouse gas mitigation market, we incorporate data on production and biofuel processing for the designated energy crops—switchgrass, hybrid poplar,...

Recent work on global patterns of deforestation has shown that countries with high per capita GDP or low remaining forest cover are more likely to be experiencing afforestation than deforestation. Here, I show that the relationship is more complex than previously described, because the effect of one variable is dependent upon the value of the other. As a result, high-income nations exhibit the ...

Chironomids preserved in a sediment core from Lago di Origlio (416 m a.s.l.), a lake in the foreland of the Southern Swiss Alps, allowed quantitative reconstruction of Late Glacial and Early Holocene summer temperatures using a combined Swiss–Norwegian temperature inference model based on chironomid assemblages from 274 lakes. We reconstruct July air temperatures of ca. 10 C between 17 300 and ...

afforestation of contaminated areas is considered as a possible strategy for reduction of contaminations. in the present study, the effects of lead (pb) and cadmium (cd) were investigated on chlorophyll fluorescence parameters (fv/fm, fo, and fm), photosynthetic pigments (chlorophyll a, b, and total chlorophyll), and proline in one-year-old seedlings of celtis caucasica and robinia pseudoacacia...

Concerns have been raised among the scientific communities about the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon sequestration rates can be maintained or increased by afforestation, reforestation, avoided deforestation, forest preservation and particular tending and cultural operations on existing forests. Of these, afforestation and reforestation are the only eligible p...

Terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems contribute almost equally to the sequestration of ca 50 per cent of anthropogenic CO(2) emissions, and already play a role in minimizing our impact on Earth's climate. On land, the majority of the sequestered carbon enters soil carbon stores. Almost one-third of that soil carbon can be found in peatlands, an area covering just 2-3% of the Earth's landmass. Pea...

Individual owned forests have boomed in the last decade in China. Hundreds of millions of private forest owners have emerged since years of afforestation practice and collective forest ownership reform. Most of those private forest owners are former peasants living in afforestation areas. They thirst for forestry information, such as technique knowledge, forestry policies, finance, marketing, e...