A population of hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus L.) in pasture land in Canterbury was fcund to vary between less than four and eight per hectare. Feeding habits were studied through stomach contents and analysis of faeces. Grass grub beetles (Costelytra ualandica) and porina moths (Wiseana cervinta), both important pasture pests, were relatively important food items. Estimates of the number of g...

Estuarine ecosystems are largely influenced by watersheds directly connected to them. In the Mobile Bay, Alabama watersheds we examined the effect of land cover and land use (LCLU) changes on discharge rate, water properties, and submerged aquatic vegetation, including freshwater macrophytes and seagrasses, throughout the estuary. LCLU scenarios from 1948, 1992, 2001, and 2030 were used to infl...

1. Patterns of World Food Consumption and Production After water, food is our most vital item of consumption. About three-quarters of the human food supply comes from agriculture (the balance being supplied by fishing, hunting and gathering). Cropland and permanent pasture cover some 37 percent of the world’s land area and a much higher proportion of the habitable land area. Food production is ...

The main objective of this study was to evaluate what would be the economic and environmental consequences of losing the GMO traits in the U.S. for the major crops of corn, soybeans, and cotton. The first step was to obtain from the literature a range of estimates of the yield loses if we move away from GMO traits in the U.S. The second step was to introduce the yield losses obtained in the fir...

We developed a global land-use allocation model that can be linked to integrated assessment models (IAMs) with a coarser spatial resolution. Using the model, we performed a downscaling of the IAMs' regional aggregated land-use projections to obtain a spatial land-use distribution, which could subsequently be used by Earth system models for global environmental assessments of ecosystem services,...

This study examines whether policies to encourage cattle ranching intensification in Brazil can abate global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by sparing land from deforestation. We use an economic model of global land use to investigate, from 2010 to 2030, the global agricultural outcomes, land use changes, and GHG abatement resulting from two potential Brazilian policies: a tax on cattle from co...

Intensive mechanized agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon grew by >3.6 million hectares (ha) during 2001-2004. Whether this cropland expansion resulted from intensified use of land previously cleared for cattle ranching or new deforestation has not been quantified and has major implications for future deforestation dynamics, carbon fluxes, forest fragmentation, and other ecosystem services. We c...

In this paper, we explore the potential of remote sensing to map pastures areas and by this way establish models for predicting cattle density and location. First, an object based classification (OB) was made in Landsat 5 images for three different municipalities to provide a land-cover map. Second, on the basis of Brazilian official livestock database, a statistical model to predict number of ...

Dairy cows fed on perennial-ryegrass pasture produce higher-quality milk in terms of fatty-acid composition; however, they produce much less milk compared to dairy cows under other systems. The low dry-matter intake (DMI) has been identified as the main factor responsible for the lower milk production in pasture-based systems. To maximize milk production from those systems it is important to ma...

Expansion of agriculture on new lands is recognized as one of the most significant human alterations to the global environment. Although food and fiber production are essential ecosystem services (ES) to humankind, the land use change process implicates in the adoption of intensive agricultural practices directly related to the depletion of a wide range of ES at local, regional and global scale...