Studies on land use change and food security in China have often neglected the regional variability of land use change and food production conditions. This study explores the various components of agricultural production in China in a spatially explicit way. Included are changes in agricultural area, multiple cropping index, input use, technical efficiency and technological change. Different re...

Several arthropods are known to be highly beneficial to agricultural production. Consequently it is of great relevance to study the importance of land management and land composition for the conservation of beneficial aphid-predator arthropod species in agricultural areas. Therefore our study focusing on the beneficial arthropod Bembidion lampros had two main purposes: I) identifying the physic...

Human activities such as research & development, infrastructure or management are of major importance for agricultural productivity. These activities can be summarized as agricultural land-use intensity. We present a measure, called the τ -factor, which is an alternative to current measures for agricultural landuse intensity. The τ -factor is the ratio between actual yield and a reference yield...

Agricultural food production and consumption covers activities ranging from agriculture to food consumption. Pollution and food contamination related to the use of production technologies and processes, as well as from the use of products aimed at increasing agricultural yields and facilitating food conservation, have significant environmental consequences. There are a number of important issue...

Concerns about sustainability in agricultural systems centre on the need to develop technologies and practices that do not have adverse effects on environmental goods and services, are accessible to and effective for farmers, and lead to improvements in food productivity. Despite great progress in agricultural productivity in the past half-century, with crop and livestock productivity strongly ...

Agricultural land management, such as fertilization, liming, and tillage affects soil properties, including pH, organic matter content, nitrification rates, and the microbial community. Three different study sites were used to identify microorganisms that correlate with agricultural land use and to determine which factors regulate the relative abundance of the microbial signatures of the agricu...