Recent changes in air quality regulations present a potential obstacle to continued use of prescribed fire as a land management tool. Lowering of the acceptable daily concentration of particulate matter from 65 to 35 μg/m3 will bring much closer scrutiny of prescribed burning practices from the air quality community. To work within this narrow window, land managers need simple tools to allow them to estimate their potential emissions and examine trade-offs between continued use of prescribed fire and other means of fuels management.

The structure of fungal communities was examined in soil subjected to 5 years of different agricultural land management and tomato production practices. Length heterogeneity polymerase chain reaction (LH-PCR) of fungal rDNA internal transcribed spacer-1 (ITS-1) regions was used to create genomic fingerprints of the soil fungal communities.

Proteins comprise one of the largest N inputs to soils. There is, therefore, a need to investigate the factors involved in the inputs and fate of proteins in soil. While land use management is expected to influence the amount and diversity of soil proteins, the responses of protein as a source of mineralizable N to land use changes have not yet been studied. We hypothesized that extractable soil protein could be a sensitive indicator in evaluating the effect of stress in ecosystem.

RothC and Century are two of the most widely used soil organic matter (SOM) models. However there are few examples of specific parameterisation of these models for environmental conditions in East Africa. The aim of this study was therefore, to evaluate the ability of RothC and the Century to estimate changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) resulting from varying land use/management practices for the climate and soil conditions found in Kenya.

We modeled the integrated effects of natural disturbances and management activities for three disturbance scenarios on a 178,000 ha landscape in the upper Grande Ronde Subbasin of northeast Oregon. The landscape included three forest environments (warm-dry, cool-moist, and cold) as well as a mixture of publicly and privately owned lands. Our models were state and transition formulations that treat vegetation change as probabilistic transitions among structure and cover types.

Many tropical landscapes are today characterized by small forest patches embedded in an agricultural mosaic matrix. In such highly fragmented landscapes, agroforests have already been recognized as refuges for biodiversity but few studies have investigated the potential of non-forested land-use types to contribute to overall biodiversity of functionally important taxa in the tropics.

A significant challenge in ecological studies has been defining scales of observation that correspond to the relevant ecological scales for organisms or processes of interest. Remote sensing has become commonplace in ecological studies and management, but the default resolution of imagery often used in studies is an arbitrary scale of observation. Segmentation of images into objects has been proposed as an alternative method for scaling remotely-sensed data into units having ecological meaning.