There is an increasingly well-founded understanding of the chief drivers and constraints to widespread adoption by Australian landholders to practices to manage dryland salinity. However, each specific situation depends on a range of biophysical, social and economic factors. Such is the case in this study that examines farmers' salinity management in the Wallatin-O'Brien catchments in the low-medium rainfall zone of the Western Australian wheatbelt.

Bromus tectorum is expanding across western North America. This spread is due to its own competitive abilities, land management practices, and unintended transport by the public as the plant's spikelets often lodge in clothing. Many assume that washing in a laundry machine makes the seeds nonviable: we decided to test this assumption. We hypothesized that seeds would exhibit lower rates of germination and emergence after being laundered, and the effect would be stronger if bleach was used.

Until around 1995 it was challenging to make the scientific results of research projects publicly available except through presentations at meetings or conferences, or as papers in academic journals. Then it began to be clear that the Internet could become the main medium to publish and share new information with a much wider audience. The DESIRE Project (desertification mitigation and remediation of land—a global approach for local solutions) has built on expertise gained in previous projects to develop an innovative online ‘Harmonized Information System’ (HIS).

Several recent reports on cropland soil organic carbon (SOC) stock changes throughout Europe indicate a general continuing loss of SOC from these soils. As most arable soils in Europe are not in an equilibrium situation because of past changes in land-use and management practices, shifts in both have been suggested to drive this decline of SOC stocks. A lack of data has prevented the unambiguous verification of the contribution of these factors to SOC loss.

Wildlife conservationists and agencies have recommended managing rangelands for vegetation heterogeneity to improve wildlife habitat, particularly for many grassland birds. However, range management focuses on livestock production and associated practices and structural items (fences, water developments) that are applied to improve livestock distribution.

We assessed the aqueous toxicity mitigation capacity of a hydrologically managed floodplain wetland following a synthetic runoff event amended with a mixture of sediments, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus), and pesticides (atrazine, S-metolachlor, and permethrin) using 48-h Hyalella azteca survival and phytoplankton pigment, chlorophyll a. The runoff event simulated a 1 h, 1.27 cm rainfall event from a 16 ha agricultural field.

Funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited. This article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land-use conversion, by incorporating spatially explicit land-use change and hedonic price models. This strategy is compared to two alternative strategies that omit either land cost or conversion threat.

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of the soil tillage system on soil enzymatic activity. The performed investigations, employing two soil tillage systems: classical (ploughing) and simplified (no-tillage), were carried out on lessives soils (Luvisols) and rusty soils (Arenosols) differing typologically, with regard to their kind and species. The activity of the following five enzymes was determined in soil samples: dehydrogenases, acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, urease and protease.

Considered a keystone species in the southeastern US coastal plain, gopher tortoises occupy a variety of upland habitat types. Although upland pine-dominated habitats have received much attention, few studies have examined tortoises in nearby coastal beach dune habitats. To examine the distribution and abundance of gopher tortoises in northeast Florida coastal habitats, comprehensive burrow surveys were conducted 3 times during the last 8 yrs on 2 separate gopher tortoise populations near St. Augustine, Florida.