Economic incentive programs are increasingly promoted in the United States and Europe as a method to encourage sustainable forest management practices on privately owned lands. This paper employs spatial analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of one such program created in Illinois through passage of the Illinois Forestry Development Act (IFDA). The Act establishes economic incentives available...

It is well established that extensive reading promotes the incidental learning of L1 and L2 receptive vocabulary; however, little is known about its effectiveness on productive gains in vocabulary knowledge. This paper investigates the extent to which extensive reading combined with writing tasks promotes productive vocabulary growth of Japanese university students. To examine changes in vocabu...

A move by the US government to preserve more public lands as wilderness has been welcomed by environmentalists but has angered ranchers, sportsmen and energy companies that fear access to land will be reduced. The new policy, initiated at the end of last year, directs the Bureau of Land Management to survey its vast holdings from Alaska to Arizona in search of unspoilt wildlife areas. The agenc...

The problem of environmental degradation is becoming very real in Nigeria. It is also becoming a major source of insecurity locally. In recent times, flooding which affects most parts of the country has resulted in displacement of communities in most states of the federation. While flooding is largely a natural phenomenon, the upgrading of environmental infrastructure should be complemented wit...

Executive summary: We scrutinized peer-reviewed literature, technical books, and key reports in order to detect any evidence for a differential ability between public and public lands to protect imperiled species in the United States. Limitations in data availability and/or in study scale limited our comparison mostly to certain contrasts of federal public versus mostly private lands. At a nati...

Perennial cellulosic feedstocks may have potential to reduce life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by offsetting fossil fuels. However, this potential depends on meeting a number of important criteria involving land cover change, including avoiding displacement of agricultural production, not reducing uncultivated natural lands that provide biodiversity habitat and other valued ecosystem se...

Mediterranean-type ecosystems constitute one of the rarest terrestrial biomes and yet they are extraordinarily biodiverse. Home to over 250 million people, the five regions where these ecosystems are found have climate and coastal conditions that make them highly desirable human habitats. The current conservation landscape does not reflect the mediterranean biome's rarity and its importance for...

this study was conducted to determine physiological and morphological variation of strains of the ectomycorrhizal fungus hebeloma cylindrosporum associated with pinus pinaster and its consequence on the symbiotic processes in coastal forests adjacent to bordeaux, south west france, from 2003-2005. mycelial cultures were conducted in the laboratory on a rich medium (ymg). diploid fungal strains ...

Although dry farming is important in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Khorasan, as well as some other districts, a large proportion of Iran’s agriculture has always depended upon irrigation. Approximately half the annual grain crop, and an overwhelming proportion of other crops, are irrigated. With the exception of the Caspian littoral almost the whole of Iran is classified as semi-arid or arid. As i...