Shifting agriculture in the tropics has been replaced by sedentary smallholder farming on a few hectares of degraded land. To address low yields and low income both, the soil fertility, the agroecosystem functions, and the source of income can be restored by diversification with nitrogen-fixing trees and the cultivation of indigenous tree species that produce nutritious and marketable products....

increased soil dryness of hillsides and lands around the gully causes the aggravation of the gully erosion which leads to the desertion of the environment. soil moisture contents are various in different soil depths, gully positions, and in various land uses. these are fundamental for ecosystem sustainability in arid and semi-arid area. therefore, understanding the behavior of soil moisture in ...

I develop a model of heterogeneous land quality and study the relation between trade, farming productivity and welfare in Peru, where high domestic and international trade costs pose a major barrier to efficient farming. To quantify the model, I use a new dataset on spatially disaggregated crop prices, yields and land allocations. I then use the model to measure the welfare and productivity eff...

Land use and land cover patterns are shaped by the interplay of human and ecological processes. Thus, heterogeneous cultural landscapes have developed, delivering multiple ecosystem services. To guarantee human well-being, the development of land use types has to be evaluated. Scenario development and land use and land cover change models are well-known tools for assessing future landscape chan...

Tongyu County in Northeast China is highly prone to land degradation due to its fragile physical settings characterized by a flat topography, a semi-arid climate, and a shallow groundwater table. This study aims to determine the causes of land degradation through detecting the long-term trend of land cover changes. Degraded lands were mapped from satellite images recorded in 1992 and 2002. Thes...

SUMMARY There is a rising awareness of the many negative environmental impacts related to the rapidly growing global production and consumption of animal products, such as land degradation, biodiversity losses, emissions of nutrients (most importantly nitrogen and phosphorus) and greenhouse gases. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and, more recently, Carbon Footprinting (CF), have become the major m...

land use change may influence many natural phenomena and ecological processes, including runoff, soil erosion, sedimentation and soil conditions. decreasing of forest area in the north of iran is one of the critical problems in recent years. the aims of this study are to detect land use changes between 1967 to 2002 using satellite images of land sat 7 etm+ (2002), aerial photos and digital topo...

The well-known inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is usually explained in terms of diminishing returns with respect to land and other inputs coupled with various types of market frictions that prevent the efficient allocation of land across farms. We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns one can provide an alternative explanation for this phenomenon using end...

Prior to 1996 and the Congolese wars, exploitative land policies pushed farmers in the eastern highlands of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into a vulnerable position, with cattle manure sustaining intensive cultivation. This exposed households to a complete breakdown in mixed farming as cattle became targets of war. This study of villages in South Kivu offers an inside understanding...