Phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analysis was used to characterise the microbial communities in the soil under long-term pre-harvest burning of sugarcane and several other land uses, and on a long-term experiment comparing sugarcane burnt before harvest and sugarcane harvested green with retention of a trash blanket. Trends in total PLFAs (total microbial biomass) followed the order: kikuyu pastu...

the mahabad river watershed has been exposed to severe erosion as a result of landuse change. the aim of this study is to quantify the amount of sediment yield and the relationship between land use change and slope. different sources such as geologic and topographic maps, satellite images, hydrometric as well as meteorological data were used to extract and gather the information needed for this...

For the past two decades, there has been extensive debate on the destructive interaction between beef production and tropical forests in Latin America. The primary concern has been deforestation to provide land for pasture and cattle production. Beef production has been part of the land use mosaic in the Bolivian lowlands for centuries and will undoubtedly remain so for the foreseeable future. ...

Regional and global environmental modeling depend on soil data for input layers or parameterization. However, randomly located observations, such as provided by agricultural databases, are not always representative of trends identified in field studies conducted under carefully controlled conditions. Many researchers lament the paucity of soil profile data in Amazônia, and suggest that given mo...

Irrigation intensifies land use by increasing crop yield but also impacts water resources. It affects water and energy balances and consequently the microclimate in irrigated regions. Therefore, knowledge of the extent of irrigated land is important for hydrological and crop modelling, global change research, and assessments of resource use and management. Information on the historical evolutio...

Background: Forest conversion to agriculture and pasture that has occurred in the last decades southern Mexico can affect ecological functioning of rivers streams. Objective: investigate how land use change at different scales (catchment riparian zone) influences water quality benthic chlorophyll streams Chiapas Tabasco mountains. Methods: Over a period 13 months, physicochemical variables were...

BACKGROUND Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) presents a serious public health challenge within China. Mass screening ultrasound surveys can detect pre-symptomatic AE, but targeting areas identified from hospital records is inefficient regarding AE. Prediction of undetected or emerging hotspots would increase detection rates. Voles and lemmings of the subfamily Arvicolinae are important intermediate ...

[1] Degradation of cattle pastures is a management concern that influences future land use in Amazonia. However, ‘‘degradation’’ is poorly defined and has different meanings for ranchers, ecologists, and policy makers. Here we analyze pasture degradation using objective scalars of photosynthetic vegetation (PV), nonphotosynthetic vegetation (NPV), and exposed soil (S) derived from Landsat image...

Management practices can disturb ecological communities in grazing lands, which represent one-quarter of land surface. But three knowledge gaps exist regarding disturbances: disturbances potentially interact but are most often studied singly; experiments with multiple ecosystems as treatment units are rare; and relatively new metrics of phylogenetic community structure have not been widely appl...