Conservation decisions should be evaluated for how they meet conservation goals at multiple spatial extents. Conservation easements are land use decisions resulting from a combination of social and environmental conditions. An emerging area of research is the evaluation of spatial distribution of easements and their spatial correlates. We tested the relative influence of interacting social and ...

The expansion of cities entails the abandonment of forest and agricultural lands, and these lands‘ conversion into urban areas, which results in substantial impacts on ecosystems. Monitoring these changes and planning urban development can be successfully achieved using multitemporal remotely sensed data, spatial metrics, and modeling. In this paper, urban land use change analysis and modeling ...

Thar region of Rajasthan, with its varied characteristics in culture, economies, the environment, governance and religion, is home to semi-urban and urban agriculture that seems to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the homeland of the first farmers. Arid lands and deserts make up a large part of Rajasthan. Two-thirds of the state is desert or dry-lands. Half the state’s population is f...

The compaction of soils used for crop production is becoming an increasingly important consideration in South Africa following the shift towards reduced tillage and increased mechanisation of in-season operations and harvesting. The intensification of dairying has also been found to have a deleterious effect on soil quality, particularly in terms of compaction by trampling, which results in los...

Agriculture is being challenged to provide food, and increasingly fuel, for an expanding global population. Producing bioenergy crops on marginal lands--farmland suboptimal for food crops--could help meet energy goals while minimizing competition with food production. However, the ecological costs and benefits of growing bioenergy feedstocks--primarily annual grain crops--on marginal lands have...

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...

Increases in agricultural commodity price triggered by ethanol production and other socioeconomic conditions have dramatically affected land uses and agronomic practices in the U.S. This study used crop-specific land cover data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to analyze agricultural expansion and crop rotation pattern from 2006 to 2013 in the Midwest Corn Belt (MWCB): nine states...

Unsupervised change detection of agricultural lands in seasonal and annual periods is necessary for farming activities and yield estimation. Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data due to their special characteristics are a powerful source to study temporal behaviour of land cover types. PolSAR data allows building up the powerful observations sensitive to the shape, orientation and...

The 1993 flood of the Missouri River led to the abandonment of agriculture on considerable land in the floodplain. This abandonment led to a restoration opportunity for the U.S. Federal Government, purchasing those lands being sold by farmers. Restoration of this floodplain is complicated, however, by an imperfect understanding of its past environmental and vegetative conditions. We examined en...

This book is focused on the pretreatment of plant biomass, a necessary step for efficient conversion of plant cell-wall materials to liquid transportation fuels and other products. Pretreatment is required because it is difficult to access, separate, and hydrolyze monomeric sugars from biopolymers within biomass. Accessible sugars can be further upgraded to products through chemical processes s...