Pricing greenhouse gas emissions is a burgeoning and possibly lucrative financial means for climate change mitigation. Emissions pricing is being used to fund emissions-abatement technologies and to modify land management to improve carbon sequestration and retention. Here we discuss the principal land-management options under existing and realistic future emissions-price legislation in Australia, and examine them with respect to their anticipated direct and indirect effects on biodiversity.

The objective of this paper is to contribute to progress in the choices of strategies for further development of goat farming in the 21st century. During the last 20 years, the number of goats around the world increased (by about 60%) not only in the countries with low income (75%) but also in those with high (20%) or intermediate (25%) income.

While numerous scientific publications have used biological data and sometimes decision theory to identify where conservation funds should be invested, studies that examine where money for conservation actually has been spent and how investment patterns have changed through time are scarce. We analyze changing spatial patterns of spending on land protection, using investments by a major conservation organization, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), in the conterminous United States as a case study.

Long-term records from USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges (EF&Rs) are exceptionally valuable scientific resources and common ground for research in natural resource management. Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, Southern Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina, is one of 82 EF&Rs located throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

This paper deals with the effects of land levelling on soil hydrological properties and spatial variability of soil moisture at different depths in bare vineyard fields under different rainfall distributions over the year. The research was carried out in a levelled vineyard in the Penedès region (NE Spain), which is representative of the land management practices in that area.

A number of studies have dealt with the assessment of potential and actual desertification risk using composite indices. The Environmental Sensitivity Areas (ESA) approach, developed in the framework of MEDALUS project funded by the European Community, is one of the most used procedures to monitor land vulnerability to degradation in the Mediterranean region. The final output of this procedure is an index (ESI) composing four indicators of climate, soil, vegetation, and land management based on 14 elementary variables.

This study examined changes in never-harvested mixed conifer (MCF), spruce-fir (SFF), and quaking aspen forests (QAF) in Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), Arizona, USA based on repeat sampling of two sets of vegetation study plots, one originally sampled in 1935 and the other in 1984. The 1935 plots are the earliest-known, sample-intensive, quantitative documentation of forest vegetation over a Southwest USA landscape. Findings documented that previously described increases in densities and basal areas attributed to fire exclusion were followed by decreases in 1935-2004 and 1984-2005.

Understanding how vegetation composition varies with season and interannual climate variability is important for any ecological research that uses vegetation data derived from surveys for the basis of inference. Misunderstanding this variation can influence land management and planning decisions, leading to poor implementation of biodiversity offsetting mechanisms, for example. We monitored plots (400 m²) grazed by livestock paired with adjacent ungrazed plots in derived native pastures four times a year over 2.5 years on the North‐West Slopes of New South Wales.

SUMMARYPrescribed burning in forestry is a valuable land management tool that has been extensively used in Australia, Eurasia, and North America. Nevertheless, fire is inherently dangerous and may impose risk upon humans, properties, and other natural resources. With the case of southern United States, the objective of this study is to assess the trend of administrative law reforms for forestry prescribed burning within the theoretical framework of management-based regulation.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics affect soil quality, agricultural productivity and atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Despite the need for spatial assessments of SOC content over time, reliable estimates from traditional field survey methods are limited by data availability; where measurements are often made at discrete point locations, at a coarse sample spacing or over a limited spatial extent.