Numerous agro-environmental indicators have been developed to assess the impact of farming systems on biodiversity. They can be combined into logistic models for predicting the presence of species of ecological interest. In general, several models are available for a given species and their practical value depends on their accuracy and the cost of measurement of their input variables.

In 2004, four focus groups consisting of agricultural landowners were organized in Northcentral Iowa to assess opportunities for hunting along in-field shelterbelts and on adjacent lands. A majority of respondents (95%) allowed/practiced some hunting on their lands. About 55% of respondents indicated that the potential existed for developing a fee hunting market associated with in-field shelterbelts.

Private land conservation is becoming a popular policy approach, given the constraints of increasing public protected areas, which include reduced availability of land for purchase, insufficient budgets for acquisition, and escalating management costs of small, isolated reserves. Conservation covenants represent a common policy instrument, now prominent in the United States, Canada and Australia, employed to compliment the protected area network.

Collective action, on communal grazing land, has evolved in the highlands of northwestern Ethiopia to mitigate the problems of feed shortage and land degradation due to overgrazing. The exercise is liked by farmers for improving the availability of natural pasture during the long dry season when other feed sources get depleted. However, large portions of the communal grazing lands are still managed under free grazing throughout the year.

Global grain production has increased dramatically during the past 50years, mainly as a consequence of intensified land management and introduction of new technologies. For the future, a strong increase in grain demand is expected, which may be fulfilled by further agricultural intensification rather than expansion of agricultural area. Little is known, however, about the global potential for intensification and its constraints.

Mitigation strategies for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions are the central focus of the Kyoto Protocol and international scientific efforts. Agriculture plays a substantial role in the balance of the most significant greenhouse gases (CO₂, N₂O, CH₄), mostly attributed to management practices. In this study, we present data on the effects of a conversion from a cropland (Zea mays L.) to N₂-fixing grassland (Medicago sativa L.) on C cycle in an agricultural area of Northern Italy.

Innovation by farmers in land husbandry was the focus of the project Promoting Farmer Innovation (PFI), which was operational in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda from 1997 to 2001. One of the project's final activities was to document best-bet innovations. It was decided to make use of a questionnaire available under the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) to collect data on a selection of these technologies. Data were fed back into WOCAT's global database.

Protected areas remain the most commonly used tool for in situ conservation; however growth in the USA's system of public lands has stagnated while private land conservation continues to expand. Easements can provide a range of ecosystem services (ESs), but it is unknown whether conservation easements maintain ES capacities equivalent to public protected areas.

How much organic C can a region naturally store in its ecosystems? How can this be determined, when land management has altered the vegetation of the landscape substantially? The answers may lie in the soil: this study synthesized the spatial distribution of soil properties derived from the state soils geographic database with empirical measurements of old-growth forest ecosystem C to yield a regional distribution of potential maximum total-ecosystem organic C stores.

Bare ground abundance is an important rangeland health indicator and its detection is a fundamental part of range management. Remote sensing of bare ground might offer solutions for land managers but also presents challenges as modeling in semiarid environments usually involves a high frequency of spectral mixing within pixels.

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that an improved system of catchment management in combination with appropriate cropping practices can sustain increased crop production and improve soil quality of Vertisols, compared with prevailing traditional farming practices. Initiated in 1976, the improved system consisted of integrated land management to conserve soil and water, with excess rainwater being removed in a controlled manner. This was combined with improved crop rotation (legume based) and integrated nutrient management.

Bottom-up scaling of net ecosystem production (NEP) and net biome production (NBP) was used to generate a carbon budget for a large heterogeneous region (the state of Oregon, 2.5x10⁵ km2) in the western United States. Landsat resolution (30 m) remote sensing provided the basis for mapping land cover and disturbance history, thus allowing us to account for all major fire and logging events over the last 30 years. For NEP, a 23-year record (1980-2002) of distributed meteorology (1 km resolution) at the daily time step was used to drive a process-based carbon cycle model (Biome-BGC).