Research-based evidence on the effects of soil and water conservation practices (SWCPs) on soil physicochemical properties and crop yield is vital either to adopt the practices or design alternative land management strategies. Thus, this study was conducted to evaluate the effects of about 10-year-old soil bund (SB) and stone-faced soil bund (SFSB) structures on selected soil physicochemical properties, slope gradient, barley grain yield, and yield components in the Lole watershed, in the northwest highlands of Ethiopia.

In response to land degradation and the decline of farmers’ income, some low quality croplands were converted to forage or grassland in Northeast China. However, it is unclear how such land use conversions influence soil nutrients. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the influences of short term conversion of cropland to alfalfa forage, monoculture Leymus chinensis grassland, monoculture Leymus chinensis grassland for hay, and successional regrowth grassland on the labile carbon and available nutrients of saline sodic soils in northeastern China.

In the academic context, especially in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism, urban form studies are assumed to be a vehicle for reflection on the built and unbuilt city. This essay aims to challenge the most common and stabilized morphological approaches in the city reading process, invoking vegetation and its role as an element of urban composition that is recurrently left out of it.

Protected areas offer diverse ecosystem services, including cultural services related to recreation, which contribute manifold to human wellbeing and the economy. However, multiple pressures from other human activities often compromise ecosystem service delivery from protected areas. It is thus fundamental for effective management to understand the recreational values and visitor behaviors in such areas.

In recent years, the sugar industry in Malawi has been criticized for its connections to land-grabbing. The general trend in the current literature has been the attempt to identify the main actors and factors that were instrumental in the displacement of local communities. These studies often neglect the importance of each community’s in-depth perspectives on land-grabbing, which is essential in obtaining a comprehensive understanding of land-grabbing.

The renewal of historic gardens, landscapes, and sites has grown to be a current issue in Central and Eastern Europe. Based on scientific research, the Department of Garden Art of the Szent István University, Faculty of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism has been dealing with landscape renewal since 1963 on regional, settlement, and garden scales, too. More than 50 years of experience has already proved the advantage of such a research-based design approach in garden and landscape renewal processes, Landscape Architecture has developed from a very practical basis.

The implications of change on local processes have attracted significant research interest in recent times. In urban settings, green spaces and forests have attracted much attention. Here, we present an assessment of change within the predominantly desert Middle Eastern city of Riyadh, an understudied setting. We utilized high-resolution SPOT 5 data and two classification techniques—maximum likelihood classification and object-oriented classification—to study the changes in Riyadh between 2004 and 2014.

This report helps policy makers, practitioners and funding agencies identify emerging adaptation good practices and the conditions necessary for scaling up those good practices to achieve adaptation success at scale.

Recognizing the extensive literature available on outgrower cooperative farming, this case study seeks to add to this literature by providing in-depth learnings and guidance on good practices for structuring commercial, cooperative outgrower schemes in Malawi and potentially elsewhere.

This article is a contribution to the current debate on the concepts of land use planning and riparian zone
conservation. It discusses some of the major theoretical and conceptual issues that impact on the
practice of planning and conservation of riparian zones within the City of Nairobi. A conceptualization of
planning and conservation of riparian zone as well as the linkage between the two is discussed as the
paper critically seeks to identify some of the planning and conservation strategies in place, policy, legal

Land-use history, not readily available
for most places, remains the weakest link in nearly all
studies of historic vegetation change, in Africa as well
as other places in the world. Notwithstanding,
communities hold a great wealth of knowledge on the
processes and events influencing change on the land
they occupy. The Lambwe Valley, southwestern Kenya,
has a multi-ethnic population of settlers from the early
1950s. These people have seen the transformation of
an initially forested area with diverse challenges to