The Cromwell chafer, Prodontria lewisi, is a flightless chafer beetle whose natural range appears not to have been more than 500 hectares and which now, because of habitat destruction and modification, is reduced to about 100 hectares. This inhabited area is situated on the terrace on which the town of Cromwell, Central Otago, is built. The continued existence of the Cromwell chafer is threaten...

For almost two decades Brazil has become an important producer and consumer of biofuels as an energy alternative. The need to replace fossil fuels with clean fuels has given Brazilian ethanol an outstanding position. With the market promising, Brazil has been the scene of a growth of the cultivation of sugarcane monocultures to supply the sugarcane industry in the production of ethanol, sugar a...

In order to develop organic dairy production a system study called “The Öjebyn Project” was started in 1990. Öjebyn is a research station of The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in northern Sweden. There is 104 hectares of arable land; 58 hectares are grown organically and 46 hectares are grown conventionally. The feed produced on the farm was fed to around 50 dairy cows in each syst...

by P.P. Carvalho and R.J. Hance hile forecasts of economic and population trends are notoriously contentious, it seems to be fairly widely accepted that there will be approximately 11 000 million people to feed in the year 2050, which is about twice as many as there were in 1990. Simultaneously the stock of agricultural land will diminish as a consequence of urbanization, erosion, and desertifi...

The Irano-Touranian biogeography region is exposed to degradation because of anthropogenic activities and overgrazing. One of the important indirect applications of this ecosystem is Apiculture, which can be considered for reduce degradation of land and over coming for indigenous people, that were live in this area. It is possible to increase Apicultural ability in an appropriate area by identi...

From Bob Clark’s snug offi ce in Boise, Idaho, where he manages the United States government’s Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), he fi gures his computer provides fi ngertip reach to just about everybody who’s anybody in wildfi re research. This points to a primary need of nations worldwide in combating the scourge of recurrent wildfi res: tools and technology suited to the job. It’s no small ...

Global demands on agricultural land are increasing due to population growth, dietary changes and the use of biofuels. Their effect on food security is to reduce humans' ability to cope with the uncertainties of global climate change. In light of the 2008 food crisis, to secure reliable future access to sufficient agricultural land, many nations and corporations have begun purchasing large tract...

Mismanagement of soil and water resources may not only contribute to an escalation of global poverty but also jeopardize ecosystem services, with significant costs to the environment. Although not concentrated within one geographic location (3,500 million hectares), an equivalent of approximately 24 % of the earth’s land surface is degraded land, and about 2 billion people (one third of the glo...

LONGMENSHAN, CHINA—In the morning of 12 May 2008, Ren Diandong gave a talk on landslide modeling at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. A few hours later, Ren’s model was put to the supreme test: a magnitude-7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province’s Longmenshan range (Science, 20 June 2008, p. 1578). As early reports came in that afternoon of a d...

Abstract We contribute to the inverse farm size-productivity puzzle (IR) literature by examining relationship using a unique data set from southern Ghana that covers farms between 5 and 70 ha. The study uses an instrumental variable (IV) for land size mitigate some effects of measurement error in size. productivity is upheld when ordinary least squares estimators (OLS) are applied but becomes i...