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 aim of this study is to assess the effect of different management practices on mountain meadow plant biomass, species richness and diversity. The experiment was carried out in the Bohemian Forest Mts. at the altitude of 1150-1170m for 10 years. We applied three treatments (mowing, mulching - i.e., cutting and crushing of the sward into small pieces which are left at the site to decompose, abandonment - fallow) to a mountain meadow with dominant Deschampsia cespitosa, Agrostis capillaris, Festuca rubra and Hypericum maculatum.

Phosphorus (P) losses from agricultural landscapes arise from the interaction of hydrologic, edaphic, and management factors, complicated by their spatial and temporal variability. We monitored sites along two agricultural hillslopes to assess the effects of field management and hydrology on P transfers in surface runoff at different landscape positions.

This study is focused on the comparison of soil structure and soil hydraulic properties within soil profiles of a same soil type under different land management. Study was performed on Haplic Luvisol in Hněvčeves (Czech Republic). Two soil profiles, which were in close distance from each other, were chosen: under the conventional tillage, and under the 30 years ago reestablished permanent grass cover. Soil structure was analyzed using the micromorphological method.

Monitoring the crop yield is one of the key factors to define agricultural land management strategies. Recent developments in spatial information technologies enabled cost and energy saving in crop yield prediction. The aim of this paper was to predict yield of the three major crops and yield loss under soil salinity effect which is one of the most important limitation in many Mediterranean countries. Crop yields were estimated using vegetation indices and Stepwise Linear Regression (SLR) derived from Landsat (Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper) TM/ETM satellite images.

Managed grasslands occupy a large portion of the agricultural landbase, are rich in C and N and therefore represent a risk for emissions of N₂O during landuse change. Two adjacent grassland plots, one amended with 100m³ ha⁻¹ of liquid swine manure annually since 1978 and an unamended grassland were either (i) left with vegetation intact (Control) or killed by glyphosate in the autumn. Glyphosate-treated subplots were either (ii) left as an undisturbed chemical fallow, (iii) ploughed by full inversion tillage (FIT) in the autumn, or (iv) in the spring.

Benefit transfer has been an important, practical policy tool appealing to government agencies, especially when time or budget is constrained. However, the existing literature fails to support convergent validity of benefit transfer using the stated-preference method. This empirical study examines the convergent validity of benefit transfer using the choice modeling method, a potentially promising technique compatible with the heterogeneity of the transfer contexts.

The management of wildlife and its impacts on biodiversity is likely to be most successful where ecological understanding is integrated with the economic and social drivers for management, and where the attitudes and behaviour of stakeholders are fully understood. Collaboration between stakeholders at the landscape level is suggested as the most efficient ‘model’ for the management of many wildlife species such as deer. However, there has been limited research to evaluate the effectiveness of collaborative management for deer or how it is perceived by individual landowners.

The DNDC (DeNitrification and DeComposition) model was tested against experimental data on CH₄ and N₂O emissions from rice fields at different geographical locations in India. There was a good agreement between the simulated and observed values of CH₄ and N₂O emissions. The difference between observed and simulated CH₄ emissions in all sites ranged from −11.6 to 62.5 kg C ha⁻¹ season⁻¹. Most discrepancies between simulated and observed seasonal fluxes were less than 20% of the field estimate of the seasonal flux.

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.

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.