Wind erosion not only affects agricultural productivity but also soil, air, and water quality. Dust and specifically particulate matter ≤10 μm (PM-10) has adverse effects on respiratory health and also reduces visibility along roadways, resulting in auto accidents. The Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) was developed by the USDA-Agricultural Research Service to simulate wind erosion and prov...

Agroecosystems have traditionally been considered incompatible with biological conservation goals, and often been excluded from spatial conservation prioritization strategies. The consequences for the representativeness of identified priority areas have been little explored. Here, we evaluate these for biodiversity and carbon storage representation when agricultural land areas are excluded from...

Wide-ranging species cannot persist in reserves alone. Consequently, there is growing interest in the conservation value of agricultural lands that separate or buffer natural areas. The value of agricultural lands for wildlife habitat and connectivity varies as a function of the crop type and landscape context, and quantifying these differences will improve our ability to manage these lands mor...

Based on materials gained in March 2015 from the Forest Data Bank the survey of some attributes (forest address including Regional Directorate of State Forest (RDSF), area in hectares, soil unit, forest site type, dominant species in a forest stand and age of the dominant species in a stand) of post-agricultural lands occurring in Polish State Forests was conducted in the paper. Distribution of...

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...

Afforestation of agricultural lands has been one of the major land use changes in China in recent decades. To better understand the effect of such land use change on soil quality, we investigated selected soil physical, chemical and microbial properties (0-15 cm depth) in marginal agricultural land and a chronosequence of poplar (Populus euramericana cv. 'N3016') plantations (5-, 10-, 15- and 2...

Canada’s agriculturally important lands include lands that are currently used for agricultural purposes (e.g. croplands, rangeland, pastures) as well as those that show potential for future agricultural development (e.g. natural grasslands). However, because these lands generally cover large geographical extents, their assessment by conventional ground survey techniques are often time-consuming...

Groundwater is connected to the landscape above and is thus affected by the overlaying land uses. This study evaluated the impacts of land uses upon groundwater quality using trilinear analysis. Trilinear analysis is a display of experimental data in a triangular graph. Groundwater quality data collected from agricultural, septic tank, forest, and wastewater land uses for a 6-year period were u...

The problem of evaluation of agricultural land suitability is consid­ ered as a fuzzy modeling task. For assessment of land suitability, it is proposed to use fuzzy indicators. Application of individual fuzzy indicators gives oppor­ tunity for assessment of suitability of lands as degree or grade of performance when the lands are used for agricultural purposes. Using composite fuzzy indi­ cator...