Crop and land management practices affect both the quality and quantity of soil organic matter (SOM) and hence are driving forces for soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration. The objective of this study was to assess the long‐term effects of tillage, fertilizer application and crop rotation on SOC in an agricultural area of southern Norway, where a soil fertility and crop rotation experiment was initiated in 1953 and a second experiment on tillage practices was initiated in 1983.

Agricultural soils are responsible for the majority of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions in the USA. Irrigated cropping, particularly in the western USA, is an important source of N2O emissions. However, the impacts of tillage intensity and N fertilizer amount and type have not been extensively studied for irrigated systems. The DAYCENT biogeochemical model was tested using N2O, crop yield, soil N and C, and other data collected from irrigated cropping systems in northeastern Colorado during 2002 to 2006.

This study extends previous empirical research on land preservation by considering an actual land preservation scheme, the agricultural land reserve in British Columbia, Canada. The reserve was established in 1973 to ensure that development did not occur on the province's most productive agricultural land. 'To ensure that local food production is maintained,' 'the economic importance of British Columbia's agricultural sector,' and 'to protect the environment' are the most important factors that underlie support for the reserve.

We report the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover changes from 1954 to 2008 in a hilly mountainous area in the Italian northern Apennine, and ecological factors and processes associated with these dynamics. Land cover patches were mapped and analysed at three time periods (1954, 1980 and 2008). Changes over time were detected by analysing a combination of multitemporal source data from airborne images and from field surveys. Relationships between cover classes and environmental variables were analysed for the year 2008.

The need for a unified mechanistic ecological framework that improves our ability to make decisions, predicts vegetation change, guides the implementation of restoration, and fosters learning is substantial and unmet. It is becoming increasingly clear that integrating various types of ecological models into an overall framework has great promise for assisting decision making in invasive-plant management and restoration.

The influence of ageing grassland on microbial community structure in different long-term grassland regimes compared to tillage in neighbouring fields was investigated to evaluate whether grassland restoration can be considered as a specific type of management for soil conservation in northern France. Microbial community structure was examined by analyzing the distribution of total and labile organic matter, the size of bacterial and fungal populations, and bacterial metabolic fingerprints and fungal genetic fingerprints.

Calibration and validation of simulation models describing herbage growth or feed quality of semi-natural grasslands is a complex task for agronomists without investing effort into botanical surveys. To facilitate such modelling efforts, a limited number of grassland types were identified using a functional classification of species. These grassland types were characterized by three descriptors required to model herbage growth or feed quality: the abundance-weighted mean leaf dry matter content across grass species, the relative abundance of grasses, and an estimate of species richness.

Over the past 60 years, China's ancient agricultural village landscapes have been transformed by unprecedented changes in rural policy, population and agricultural technology. The village landscapes of China's Yangtze Plain are among the most ancient, densely populated and intensively managed in the world and have undergone extremely rapid development in recent decades, causing the wholesale transformation of traditional village landscape structure, primarily at fine spatial scales (

This study investigated the role that a public land grazing permit buyout would have on ranching operations and conserving private land open space in the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States. Loss of grazing permits could serve as a pivotal factor in expediting private land fragmentation if ranching operations are enticed to sell their land due to loss of economic viability.

Agri-environment schemes (AES) are central to the conservation of Europe's farmland biodiversity. The UK Government's Public Service Agreement target seeks to reverse the decline of farmland birds in England by 2020 through the use of AES. The Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) scheme, introduced in 2005, is the first non-competitive, broad-uptake stewardship scheme designed to deliver simple but effective environmental management on farms throughout England.

Botanical capacity plays a fundamental role in solving the grand challenges of the next century, including climate change, sustainability, food security, preservation of ecosystem services, conservation of threatened species, and control of invasive species. Yet critical components of botanical education, research, and management are lacking across government, academic, and private sectors.

The prevention of soil erosion is one of the most essential requirements for sustainable agriculture in developing countries. In recent years it is widely recognized that more site-specific approaches are needed to assess variations in erosion susceptibility in order to select the most suitable land management methods for individual hillslope sections. This study quantifies the influence of different land management methods on soil erosion by modelling soil loss for individual soil-landscape units on a hillslope in Southern Uganda.