Institutional settings play a key role in shaping land cover and land use. Our goal was to understand the effects of institutional changes on agricultural land abandonment in different countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the collapse of socialism. We studied ∼273 800 km2 (eight Landsat footprints) within one agro-ecological zone stretching across Poland, Belarus, Latvi...

China’s urbanization has resulted in significant changes in agricultural land use. However, understanding of the linkages between urbanization and fertilizer use intensity is limited. Using county-level panel data for Henan Province, 1995–2008 and panel econometric models, we investigate the impact of urbanization and other socioeconomic factors on fertilizer use intensity, with a focus on the ...

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...

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...

Observational evidence that agricultural intensification and land use change may be reducing the Indian summer monsoon rainfall" (2010). [1] Using gridded daily rainfall observations, and monthly satellite land surface data sets, the connection between land use change and monsoonal rainfall climatology is analyzed. A combination of statistical analysis involving genetic algorithm (GA), empirica...

Aim To develop the first national databases on land use and agricultural land use intensity in Canada for a wide variety of environmental monitoring applications.

On August 18, 2002, the Hyperion hyperspectral imager onboard the EO-1 platform recorded data over an intensively used agricultural area in north western Switzerland, the Limpach Valley. The sensor’s 198 spectral bands between 400 and 2500 nm (Level 1B1) and a spatial resolution of 30 m bear the potential for both a detailed land use classification and an accurate estimation of biophysical and ...

1. Despite wide recognition of the need for catchment-scale management to ensure the integrity of river ecosystems, the science and policy basis for joint management of land and water remains poorly understood. An interdisciplinary case study of a river basin in south-eastern Michigan is presented. 2. The River Raisin drains an area of 2776 km2, of which some 70% is agricultural land. The upper...

Plant invasions and their impact on land use pose difficult research questions, due to the complex relationships between the ecological nature of the invasion and the human responses to the invasion. This paper focuses on the linkages between an invasion of bracken fern and land use decisions in an agricultural frontier in southern Mexico. Agriculture in this region is practiced on an extensive...

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...