Mediterranean areas of both southern Europe and North Africa are subject to dramatic changes that will affect the sustainability, quantity, quality, and management of water resources. Most climate models forecast an increase in temperature and a decrease in precipitation at the end of the 21st century. This will enhance stress on natural forests and shrubs, and will result in more water consumption, evapotranspiration, and probably interception, which will affect the surface water balance and the partitioning of precipitation between evapotranspiration, runoff, and groundwater flow.

Given the nature of modern conservation acquisitions, which often result from gifts and opportunistic purchases of full or partial property rights, there is a risk that the resulting mosaic of conserved resources may not represent a coherent set of public values and benefits. With different public and private entities engaged in land conservation, one would further expect that each organization would apply separate goals and criteria to the selection and acquisition of its conservation portfolio.

The total arable land of Turkey is about 28,054,000 ha. The main income of the country is agriculture and agriculture based industry. However, the prime soils cover only 17.5% of the total land surface and the productivity of the rest of the soils is limited by topographical, chemical (e.g. high calcium carbonate content, alkalinity and low organic matter), and physical (e.g. water logging, texture) attributes. The diverse topography along with deforestation and unsuitable tillage and irrigation management has been inducing the rate of erosion in the country for centuries.

Conservation and land management organizations such as The Nature Conservancy are developing strategies to distribute conservation efforts over larger areas. Relative to fee-simple protection efforts, strategies that allow ecologically sustainable timber harvest and recreation activities, such as working forest conservation easements, should yield greater socioeconomic benefits (ecosystem services) with less investment per area without significantly compromising the conservation of biodiversity (ecological targets).

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal diversity was investigated in non-grazed, restored and over-grazed (fenced) plots of a grassland in the Inner Mongolia steppe. Plant cover and variety differ between the plots, being highest in the non-grazed to lowest in the over-grazed plots. A total of 19 AM fungal taxa belonging to six genera were found based on spores isolated from field samples and trap cultures. One belonged to Acaulospora, one to Archaeospora, one to Entrophospora, one to Gigaspora, 12 to Glomus and three to Scutellospora.

Changes in the agricultural management can potentially increase the accumulation rate of soil organic carbon (SOC), thereby sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere. In a long-term experiment (1992-2008) we examined the effects of various tillage intensities: no-tillage (NT), minimum tillage with chisel plow (MT), and conventional tillage with mouldboard plow (CT), on the topsoil profile distribution (0-30cm) of SOC, on a semi-arid loamy soil from Central Spain. The crop sequence established was cheap pea (Cicer arietinun L.) cv. Inmaculada/barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) cv. Volley.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Smoke from forest fires is a serious and increasing land management concern. However, a paucity of information exists that is specific to public perceptions of smoke. This study used conjoint analysis, a multivariate technique, to evaluate how four situational factors (i.e., smoke origin, smoke duration, health impact, and advanced warning) influence public tolerance of smoke in the northern Rocky Mountains and south-central United States.