Land use and management practices may influence plant C inputs and soil CO2 emission. We evaluated the effect of a combination of irrigation, tillage, cropping system, and N fertilization on plant biomass C, soil temperature and water content at the 0- to 15-cm depth, and CO2 emission in a sandy loam soil from April to October, 2006 to 2008, in western North Dakota.

Although recent climatic warming has markedly increased fire activity in many biomes, this trend is spatially heterogeneous. Understanding the patterns and controls of this heterogeneity is important for anticipating future fire regime shifts at regional scales and for developing land management policies. To assess climatic and land cover controls on boreal forest fire regimes, we conducted macroscopic‐charcoal analysis of sediment cores and GIS analysis of landscape variation in south‐central Alaska, USA.

Much of the coastal sage scrub habitat in Southern California that existed prior to European settlement has been developed for human uses. Over the past two to three decades, public agencies and land conservation organizations have worked to acquire some of the remaining lands for preservation. Many of these lands are degraded by past intensive livestock grazing, farming, and frequent fires, and the native flora has been replaced by weedy, exotic annual grasses and forbs, mostly of Mediterranean origin.

Market-based approaches to conservation provide two novel policy outcomes. First, they secure public environmental benefits through incentive payments to private landowners to deliver those conservation outcomes that are unlikely to be achieved through regulation. Second, they provide opportunities to influence perceptions, motivations and values, and shift behaviors among landowners towards biodiversity conservation. Here we report on our experiences in engaging private landowners through two large market-based conservation programs funded by the Australian government.

The growing multifunctionality in agriculture, combined with privatisation of previously public agricultural extension services, has resulted in a pluralistic land management advisory system. Despite benefits in terms of increased client orientation and greater advisor diversity, it is argued that these changes have resulted in the fragmentation of the land management advisory system and a reduction of interaction within the advisory system and between the advisory system and science.

We conducted a survey of 3321 Forest Service employees involved in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) followed by five focus groups to investigate agency views of the purpose of agency NEPA processes and their appropriate measures of success. Results suggest the lack of a unified critical task for Forest Service NEPA processes and that employees' functions relevant to NEPA influence their views of its meaning.

Summary The recognition that biodiversity conservation requires more than a system of reserves has led to the need to consider the outcomes of land management actions, such as timber harvesting, in the matrix land outside reserves. The design of harvesting systems can be guided by the natural disturbance regime, which in Tasmania's lowland wet eucalypt forests is infrequent, intense wildfire.

Current carbon accounting methodologies often assume interactions between above-ground and below-ground carbon, without considering effects of land management. We used data from two long-term coffee agroforestry experiments in Costa Rica and Nicaragua to assess the effect on total soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks of (i) organic versus conventional management, (ii) higher versus moderate agronomic inputs, (iii) tree shade types. During the first nine years of coffee establishment total 0–40cm depth SOC stocks decreased by 12.4% in Costa Rica and 0.13% in Nicaragua.

In Aotearoa New Zealand Māori land is often owned by communities and managed by trusts. Under communal ownership, trust managers are expected to provide for their communities in culturally responsive ways, using alternative land-related paradigms. In the context of Māori trust rural land management, geographic information systems (GIS) are seen as a beneficial resource to plan and support important decisions that have community-wide implications.