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.

How can ecologists be more effective in supporting ecologically informed rural land-use planning and policy? Improved decision making about rural lands requires careful consideration of how ecological information and analyses can inform specific planning and policy needs. We provide a brief overview of rural land-use planning, including recently developed approaches to conservation.

Vegetation change and anthropogenic development are altering ecosystems and decreasing biodiversity. Successful management of ecosystems threatened by multiple stressors requires development of ecosystem conservation plans rather than single species plans. We selected the big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) ecosystem to demonstrate this approach. The area occupied by the sagebrush ecosystem is declining and becoming increasingly fragmented at an alarming rate because of conifer encroachment, exotic annual grass invasion, and anthropogenic development.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is influenced by land use and management. Here, the carbon (CO₂-C) budgets of a managed forest (spruce), a grass site and a crop site (crop rotation) have been compared to examine the effects of different management practices on net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and net biome productivity (NBP). This approach enables a more comprehensive carbon budgeting as it takes into account carbon exports and imports for particular land uses.

Determining soil nutrient distribution is critical to identify sites which are at risk of N and P loading. Equally important are determining factors that influence such distribution (e.g. land use, land management, topography, etc.). In this research, soil nutrient distribution and its influencing factors were studied in a small-scaled watershed in the purple soil region of Sichuan Province, China. The watershed is 1.3km² with a complex land management system including agriculture and forestry.

Linkages between land management activities and stream water quality are reported for a 2480 ha catchment used for dairy farming, sheep-beef farming and forestry in Southland, New Zealand. Our approach was to reconcile measured loads of nutrients exported from the catchment with those estimated based on characterisation of farming practices within the catchment. The latter was based upon detailed surveys of farm practices and soil quality.

This special issue focuses on terrestrial biogeochemical cycles and their roles in determining current continental-scale budgets and future trends in biogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) for North America.

In this study, by using cellular analyze method according to ecological criteria, the determination of agricultural land suitability of Research and Practice Farm of Ankara University Agrucultural Faculty Farm and Haymana Research Farm of Central Research Institute for Field Crops lands, which are in Ankara province and Haymana district, was aimed. For this aim, by using Geographical Information Systems(GIS) techniques, the data layers such as some soil properties, topography and irrigation was examined for each land criterion to determine the weighted scale.