The boom in food prices over the past 15 years and associated volatility in food prices has prompted relatively wealthy countries dependent on imports to renew their focus on policies to enhance food security. This has in turn prompted many of them to search for opportunities to secure food supply internationally. Coupled with a depressed yields in other assets such as equities and bonds, the f...

Monitoring the impact of current Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) management practices on future Ecosystem Services (ESs) provisioning has been emphasized because of the effect of such practices on ecological sustainability. We sought to model and predict the impacts of future LULC changes on subsequent changes in Ecosystem Service Value (ESV) in fragile environments undergoing complex LULC changes, ...

Modern geographic information system (GIS) tools have allowed a more careful examination of how the physical characteristics of a property’s neighborhood and surrounding land uses are capitalized into property values. The ArcGIS Viewshed tool is a case in point: it identifies the cells in an input raster that can be seen from one or more observation points. In this study, we use the tool in a h...

The relationship between vegetation and soil moisture deserves attention due to its scientific importance and practical applications. However, the effects of soil moisture on vegetation development and succession are poorly documented. Here we study soil water storage in Yanhe watershed at northern Shaanxi on five different land uses, namely shrubland, farmland, natural grassland, woodland, and...

Groundwater resources are becoming the primary factor for maintaining life in arid areas. Understanding land use/cover change and its effect on groundwater depth would enhance land use and groundwater management for typical desert-oasis transition zones. Reduction of groundwater recharge and increase of groundwater exploitation during 1985 and 2010 led to the decrease of groundwater depth in Li...

Transportation activities can contribute to accumulation of heavy metals in roadside soil and grass, which could potentially compromise public health and the environment if the roadways cross farmland areas. Particularly, heavy metals may enter the food chain as a result of their uptake by roadside edible grasses. This research was conducted to investigate heavy metal (Cu, Zn, Cd, and Pb) conce...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is an important component of the surface energy balance and hydrological cycle. In this study, the eddy covariance technique was used to measure ET of the semi-arid farmland ecosystem in the Loess Plateau during 2010 growing season (April to September). The characteristics and environmental regulations of ET and crop coefficient (Kc) were investigated. The results showed...

Reclamation of abandoned farmland is crucial to a sustainable agriculture in arid regions. This study aims to evaluate the impact of different reclamation treatments on abandoned salinized farmland. We investigated four artificial reclamation treatments, continuous cotton (CC), continuous alfalfa (CA), tree-wheat intercropping (TW) and trees (TS), which were conducted in 2011–2012 in the Manasi...