Emerging sustainability challenges, such as food security, livelihood development and climate change, require innovative and experimental ways of linking science, policy and practice at all scales. This requires the development of processes that integrate diverse knowledge to generate adaptive development strategies into the future. Social learning is emerging as a promising way to make these l...

Understanding the processes of historical land-use change is crucial to the research of global environmental sustainability. Here we examine and attempt to disentangle the evolutionary interactions between land-use change and its underlying causes through a historical lens. We compiled and synthesized historical land-use change and various biophysical, political, socioeconomic, and technical da...

The trajectory of human population growth is often in stark contrast with decreasing natural resources needed to support that population. The national and global needs for food, feed, fiber and energy continue to increase relative to water availability and provide a prime example of increasing demands on limited resources. Similar resource constraints have been observed in industrial sustainabi...

Tarım, ülkelerin geleceği için vazgeçilemeyecek derecede önemli bir sektördür. Beslenmeden ekonomik gelişmeye, istihdamdan sanayi gerekli olan hammadde ihtiyacının karşılanmasına, ihracattan ulusal gelire sağladığı katkılara tüm alanlarda başat faktör olarak tarım ön plana çıkmaktadır. Hayatın hemen her alanını etkileyen böylesine sektör, ne yazık ki arazilerinin amaç dışı kullanımı sonucu sürd...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...

A seminal objective of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to ensure a fair standard of living in agriculture. Since 1992, the CAP has moved most of its policy towards direct payments (DPs) that have been decoupled from production under the Mid-Term Review (MTR) in 2003. Th e shift towards decoupled payments highlights the asymmetry of the support among farmers and countries and the need su...

The rapid expansion of commodity agriculture in tropical forest landscapes is a key driver of deforestation. To meet the growing demand from a more prosperous and expanding global population, it is imperative to develop sustainable commodity supply chains that support higher agricultural productivity, and that enable improved environmental, economic, and social outcomes. Interventions by commun...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the major barriers to application of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) technologies in sustainability of livestock by ranchers of Meshkinshahr. A sample of 120 farmers was selected by using proportional random sampling method. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire. Validity of questionnaire was determined through Agricultural Jihad ex...

SUMMER 2014 31 Ecological processes that occur at global scales are among the most impressive natural phenomena on Earth; they link environments across the globe and capture the imagination of observers. For example, billions of North American birds, representing more than 400 species, migrate annually, often thousands of miles, frequently under the cover of darkness, between breeding and nonbr...