Water is essential not only to maintain the livelihoods of human beings but also to sustain ecosystems. Over the last few decades several global assessments have reviewed current and future uses of water, and have offered potential solutions to a possible water crisis. However, these have tended to focus on water supply rather than on the range of demands for all water services (including those of ecosystems). In this paper, a holistic global view of water resources and the services they provide is presented, using Sankey diagrams as a visualisation tool.

Rapid conversion of rural land to exurban development and the ensuing impacts on natural resources have been well-documented, but information about exurban landowners is lacking. To address this knowledge gap, we surveyed exurban landowners in six Wyoming counties and documented demographic characteristics, motivations, knowledge, and attitudes about natural resources and land management. The overall response rate was 55.6%. Generally, respondents were of retirement age, had lived in Wyoming for about 13 yr, and were raised in areas with a population

This study was conducted to determine the reproductive characteristics of Barbarea vulgaris under different disturbance regimes (mowing and tilling) in two different habitats: a levee and a wheat field. On the levee, 77 of the 114 individuals that had had their floral stalks removed by the first mowing produced new rosettes at the basal part of the stem during the same growing season. The plants that were mowed four times per year had a significantly greater survival rate than the plants that were mowed twice per year.

Up to 50% of nitrogen (N) fertilizer can remain in soil after crop harvest in dryland farming. Understanding the fate of this residual fertilizer N in soil is important for evaluating its overall use efficiency and environmental effect. Nitrogen-15 (¹⁵N)-labeled urea (165 kg N ha ⁻¹) was applied to winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) growing in three different fertilized soils (no fertilizer, No-F; inorganic nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilization, NPK; and manure plus inorganic NPK fertilization, MNPK) from a long-term trial (19 years) on the south of the Loess Plateau, China.

The United States (US) and European Union (EU) share many general policy aims for rural areas, but they differ in the ways in which they try to achieve these aims. The principal difference lies in the role envisioned by agriculture in overall rural development. EU policies treat agriculture as a provider of public goods, and many of its 'rural' programmes target agriculture. In the US, very few Federal rural development programs are focused solely on agriculture.

Using environmental indices (EIs) to rank applications for enrollment in conservation programs is becoming common practice. However, there is little guidance on how it should be done. The indices adopted by existing programs have often been linear, using weighted averages of environmental parameters without explicit consideration of whether they represent a reliable preference ordering on environmental states. Our article investigates society's weights for addressing multiple resource concerns and how functional forms of EIs can influence program outcomes.

Research on the impacts of wildfire and invasive plants in rangelands has focused on biophysical rather than human dimensions of these environmental processes. We offer a synthetic perspective on economic and social aspects of wildfire and invasive plants in American deserts, focusing on the Great Basin because greater research attention has been given to the effects of cheatgrass expansion than to other desert wildfire/invasion cycles.

This study investigates how sustainability and its inherent values figure into farmers' discourse, i.e., how farmers and members of farming communities talk about sustainability. We conducted qualitative interviews of various individuals in a single Iowa community to determine whether the visions guiding their land management choices resembled at all the ideals of a sustainable agriculture. Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of identification and division, we rhetorically analyzed the interview transcripts.

Iconic species can present particular political and management imperatives and often shape national identities, and are shaped by them. More importantly, in the case of K'gari-Fraser Island and the dingo, shape the perceptions of iconicity in that landscape. Iconic species are used to represent diverse human valuing such as commercial, recreational, national, conservation and cultural.