land vulnerable to desertification increased in the mediterranean basin since world war ii dueto several interacting factors including climate variations, land-use changes and growing human pressure. itwas hypothesized that the increase in the level of land vulnerability is not distributed homogeneously overtime and space while impacting preferentially landscapes surrounding large urban agglome...

The species pool hypothesis is applied here to the interpretation of ‘hump-shaped’ (unimodal) species richness patterns along gradients of both habitat fertility and disturbance level (the habitat templet). A ‘left-wall’ effect analogous to that proposed for the evolution of organismal complexity predicts a right-skewed unimodal distribution of historical habitat commonness on both gradients. A...

Forests in lowland Bolivia suffer from severe deforestation caused by different types of agents and land use activities. We identify three major proximate causes of deforestation. The largest share of deforestation is attributable to the expansion of mechanized agriculture, followed by cattle ranching and small-scale agriculture. We utilize a spatially explicit multinomial logit model to analyz...

H ow a growing world population can sustain itself on Planet Earth has been the focus of much research. Norman Borlaug (1), the ‘‘father of the Green Revolution,’’ argued that one answer is to intensify agriculture to produce more food on the same area of land. But what he promoted as a policy strategy, others have called the ‘‘Borlaug hypothesis,’’ aiming to add it to sustainability science th...

The objective of this article was to develop a deeper understanding of the interdependences between smallholder farming and the state of environmental management in rural Malawi. We examined the agricultural local governance framework in Malingunde Extension Planning Area (EPA), its contribution to food security and how it conflicts with overall land and forest resources management. The charcoa...

during late nineteenth century, khuzistan was considered to be the most fertile land of persia which at one time had yielded $ 50 million if calculated on 1962 price index. many british officials presented in iran and india office have recorded the abundance of water through a network of five rivers and canals, making khuzistan a fertile ground for major staple and cash crops. at the time when ...

Within the Oltenia surface mining region of Romania, 14,890 ha have been disturbed and only 1,002 ha have been reclaimed. The majority of this disturbance has involved agricultural land (12,208 ha), of which only a small amount has been reclaimed (552 ha). Forest land disturbed by surface mining in this region amounted to 2,682 ha, of which only 450 ha have been reclaimed. Therefore, huge land ...

I n the wake of the worst financial crisis since 1930, many countries face the challenge of creating a new economy model that relies less on financial services but more on production. Science therefore plays an increasingly important role to generate the knowledge that will eventually give rise to these new products. This coincides with the grand challenges of the 21 century: dealing with the e...