Despite their importance to rural livelihoods, the economic and environmental sustainability of contemporary communal pastoral systems of the Kalahari is increasingly being put under scrutiny.
The planning and management of urban forest has become increasingly important as a focus of urban environmental management. The objectives of this study were to analyze the landuse/land cover and to map functional zones of the urban forest in the upper catchment area of Addis Ababa.
The aim of this study was to develop partial least squares (PLS) models to predict the concentrations of 45 elements in soils extracted by the aqua regia (AR) method using diffuse reflectance Fourier Transform mid-infrared (MIR; 4000–500cm⁻¹) spectroscopy.
In this paper the use of fenced grazing camps to manage the rangeland commons is challenged. A historical perspective is presented on fencing and rotational grazing in South Africa. Two case studies in KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape illustrate the factors that influence the management of rangelands under communal land tenure without the use of fences.
This paper aims to contribute to the debates on communal rangelands and analyses the gendered dimension of land rights and land access in the rural areas of Namaqualand.
Assessing the health of rangeland ecosystems based solely on annual biomass production does not fully describe the condition of the plant community; the phenology of production can provide inferences about species composition, successional stage, and grazing impacts.
The grassland biome of South Africa is a major resource for livestock farming; yet the soils of these rangelands are stressed differently by various management systems. The aim of this study was to investigate how basic soil properties respond to different management systems.
Although the literature is full of references to soil degradation under forest cultivation, very little information is available on changes in soil properties following deforestation of the Hyrcanian area in northern Iran. Also, the literature provides little information on the effects of conversion from deforested cropland to grazing, a likely direction of land-use change in northern Iran.
Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes.
This paper introduces a generic assessment method called pluri-energy analysis. It aims to assess the types of energy used in agricultural systems and their conversion efficiencies. Four types of energy are considered: fossil energy, gross energy contained in the biomass, energy from human and animal labor and solar energy.
Hunting is often either portrayed as the ultimate means to enact a close connection between the human being and nature, or investigated in terms of its contribution to livelihoods.
The use and exploitation of natural resources is generally structured by institutions, especially by property institutions. The main objective of this paper is to present a diachronic analysis of the institutionalization of common land property in Portugal. The several types of ownership may be largely explained by common land history.