Assessments of potential environmental impacts of non-point source (NPS) pollutants at local and regional scales are necessary as a basis for effective management strategies to protect precious resources such as land and water. Intensive watershed scale study is therefore necessary to develop management strategies for abating the agricultural NPS pollution. The major goal of the present study was to identify the critical areas of an agricultural watershed and recommend the best management practices using a physical process based watershed scale model, soil water assessment tool (SWAT).

Land managers increasingly need to collect, store, and analyze monitoring and assessment datasets that include multiple methods and occur over multiple years. The Database for Inventory,Monitoring and Assessment (DIMA) is a highly customizable software tool for data collection, management, and interpretation. DIMA is a free Microsoft Access database that can be used easily without extensive knowledge of Access (download DIMA from http://jornada.nmsu.edu/monit-assess/dima/download).

Subsidence in Yunlin County, Taiwan, is serious and continuous. The Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) route crosses the subsidence area and might be affected by differential settlements. It is important to evaluate the pumping quantity for water resource management and to predict the subsidence for land resource management to mitigate the subsidence problem in Taiwan.

While community based resource management was practiced for centuries by many traditional societies of the world, these resources are continuously being eroded in the recent years. This paper uses a case study of the Khazans, the coastal wetlands of Goa, in order to study determinants of successful environmental regimes. Khazans are the low-lying coastal lands that have been reclaimed from marshy mangroves by the construction of embankments and sluice gates.

This paper describes a manual-style Decision Support System that integrates land degradation indicators with adaptive management options and is designed for land managers to easily collect data and monitor progress towards environmental sustainability goals. A number of similar tools have been developed for ranchers in southern Africa, but there has been little help for land managers under common property regimes. Manuals were therefore primarily designed for use by communal pastoralists in three study areas in the Kalahari, Botswana.

Understanding the interplay between land-use change, species diversity and ecosystem function is critical for the prediction of global change impacts on ecosystem services. Biodiversity experiments with artificial species assemblages have shown that community-scale species richness may affect ecosystem productivity and spatial stability. However, the use of synthetic communities with controlled levels of species density for biodiversity experiments has been criticised and their relevance for natural communities has been questioned.

In European peatlands which have been drained and cut-over in the past, re-vegetation often stagnates after the return of a species-poor Sphagnum community. Re-introduction of currently absent species may be a useful tool to restore a typical, and more diverse, Sphagnum vegetation and may ultimately improve the functioning of peatland ecosystems, regarding atmospheric carbon sequestration. Yet, the factors controlling the success of re-introduction are unclear. In Ireland and Estonia, we transplanted small and large aggregates of three Sphagnum species into existing vegetation.

We investigate the trade-off agricultural producers face between profits and stewardly activities when selecting farm practices. Instead of the profit-maximization framework, we model producer behavior in an expanded utility framework, built on production technology, and including two utility components: self and social interests. The framework introduces inherent heterogeneity and social/environmental motivations into farmer behavior. Based on this model, we hypothesize that there are farmers that are willing to forego some profit to engage in stewardly farm practices.

Globally, peatlands are regarded as important carbon stores and their conservation essential for ensuring continuation of terrestrial carbon storage. Numerous peatlands in particular regions of Europe have been degraded by drainage, burning, extraction, overgrazing and pollution in recent decades, often leading to erosion, loss of peat mass and a loss of a variety of flora. In the UK, some 90% of peatlands can be regarded as degraded.