Changes in climate and land management practices in the San Pedro River basin have altered the vegetation patterns and dynamics. Therefore, there is a need to map the spatial and temporal distribution of the vegetation community in order to understand how climate and human activities affect the ecosystem in the arid and semi-arid region. Remote sensing provides a means to derive vegetation properties such as fractional green vegetation cover (fc) and green leaf area index (GLAI).

This paper analyses some key findings emerged in the study of the Mayan community of S. Jos Sinach, located in the Guatemalan Highlands. The research highlights how colonial and post-colonial legislation influences the actual land tenure and hampers the development of the community. Little land ownership together with high demographic growth lead to insufficient crop production. As a consequence, human pressure on S. Jos forest and seasonal migration to sugar cane plantations of the Pacific Coast is carried out by householders in order to ensure subsistence to their families.

The most widely applied soil carbon models partition the soil organic carbon into two or more kinetically defined conceptual pools. The initial distribution of soil organic matter between these pools influences the simulations. Like many other soil organic carbon models, the DAYCENT model is initialised by assuming equilibrium at the beginning of the simulation.

Baobab fruit are harvested and used throughout Africa as an important source of food and are sold to generate income. Commercial use is increasing rapidly as derivatives of the fruit such as baobab seed oil and fruit pulp are being exported to Europe and North America. The cash derived from the sale of fruit support thousands of rural people. This study examines baobab fruit yields in an area being harvested for commercial use.

Determining appropriate topics and target audiences is essential to design effective educational outreach programs. Based on landowner responses to a mail survey, we determined both the importance and the availability of wildlife and forest management information topics to Mississippi landowners. Combining this information clearly identified the appropriate subject matter for outreach programs-topics important to landowners and for which information was relatively unavailable.

This article discusses the origins of natural ecosystem patterns from global to local scales. It describes how understanding these patterns can help scientists and managers in two ways. First, the local systems are shown within the context of larger systems. This perspective can be applied in assessing the connections between action at one scale and effect at another, the spatial transferability of models, and the links between terrestrial and aquatic systems. Second, scientists and managers can benefit because they gain information about the geographic patterns in ecosystems.

The response of orthopteran communities to abandonment of extensively managed hay meadows was investigated in an Alpine region. Fifty-five sites in four different successional stages were sampled: (i) mown meadows, (ii) young abandoned meadows, (iii) old abandoned meadows, and (iv) young forests. Mown meadows and young abandoned meadows (3-5 years since the last cut) had the highest, young forests the lowest mean number of orthopteran species.

In the Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopian highlands, rainfall distribution is extremely uneven both spatially and temporally. Drought frequently results in crop failure, while high rainfall intensities result in low infiltration and high runoff causing soil erosion and land degradation. These combined factors contribute to low agricultural productivity and high levels of food insecurity. Poor land management practices coupled with lack of effective rainwater management strategies aggravate the situation.

The loss of soil and carbon (C) from erosional processes is of greater importance to agricultural productivity and sustainable resource management. Land management practices influence structural properties of soil aggregates, its size and stability, and the stabilization effect of soil organic carbon (SOC), and other cementing agents. Water erosion affects all these properties and consequently decreases productivity of land. Thus, relative significance of loss of soil and C from dry and wet aggregates was studied from soil sampled from the North Appalachian Experimental Watersheds (NAWEP).