Maintaining or increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) in agricultural lands is important for soil productivity, restoration and could potentially be a factor in reducing carbon emissions. In order to implement best practices for maintaining productivity and increasing SOC, there is a need for understanding how management changes may alter SOC levels. This applied study presents a methodology to assess and predict SOC levels to better understand effects modification to land management can have in semiarid central Spain. Results show extensification using longer-term pasture rotations (e.g.

Much of Hong Kong is currently undeveloped and consists of vegetated, relatively steep hillsides, which are considered to be natural terrain. However, in many of these areas there is evidence in old aerial photographs of man-made features, which for the last 30–40 years or so have been hidden by dense vegetation. Before the 1970s the vegetation was considerably less dense than today and much of the ground surface was bare and clearly apparent.

Environmental and ecological research has long been characterized as operating along a continuum, with “basic” – representing “investigator‐initiated” research – at one end and “applied” – representing “mission‐initiated” research – at the other. While federal agency science programs ideally occupy points along this continuum, the resulting science has not always been relevant to solving environmental problems.

Despite numerous research efforts over the last decades, integrating the concept of ecosystem services into land management decision-making continues to pose considerable challenges. Researchers have developed many different frameworks to operationalize the concept, but these are often specific to a certain issue and each has their own definitions and understandings of particular terms.

Scattering slash (downed woody materials) after tree removal is increasingly prescribed by land managers as a treatment to promote the establishment and growth of understory vegetation in pinyon-juniper woodlands. However, the effects of scattering slash on soil resources and plant communities are poorly understood and often confounded with the release from tree competition.

Raw materials for animal feeding are highly deficient in Europe, which results in massive imports of soya beans from North and South America. These imports are connected with a number of environmental problems. Increasing the grain legume production in Europe could be a promising alternative. The impacts of introducing grain legumes into existing European crop rotations are investigated in this article. The environmental impacts are evaluated by using the SALCA (Swiss Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment) life cycle assessment method and the ecoinvent life cycle inventory database.

Agri-environment schemes (AES) were introduced in Europe to mitigate the loss of biodiversity in cultivated landscapes. In Switzerland, farmers have to convert 7% of the arable land into ecological compensation areas (ECA) in order to enhance biodiversity, low-input grassland making up the major part of ECA. This study investigated during 6 years the effect of ECA grassland on butterfly diversity at the field and the landscape scales in two farming landscape units of the Swiss Plateau.

Reynolds, W. D., Drury, C. F., Yang, X. M., Tan, C. S. and Yang, J. Y. 2014. Impacts of 48 years of consistent cropping, fertilization and land management on the physical quality of a clay loam soil. Can. J. Soil Sci. 94: 403–419. Soil physical quality (SPQ) is often ignored or under-monitored in long-term field studies designed to determine the economic and environmental sustainability of agricultural practices.