Rangelands, Drylands & Pastoralism

Wildfires increased dramatically in frequency and extent in the European Mediterranean region from the 1960s, aided by a general warming and drying trend, but driven primarily by socio-economic changes, including rural depopulation, land abandonment and afforestation with flammable species.

Land-use and land-cover change are important drivers of global environmental change, affecting the state of biodiversity, the global carbon cycle, and other aspects of the earth system. In this article we describe the development of the land-use model LandSHIFT, which aims to simulate land-use and land-cover change on the continental and global scale.

China's Horquin area in the northern farming–pastoral transition zone is undergoing rapid land degradation and rangeland modification that is impacting far broader areas as the source of material for dust storms. Multi-temporal Landsat images of the Horquin core area were used to generate a time series of land use covering about a 30-year period, 1975–2003.

Understanding the regulation of ecosystem CO2 flux from forage production systems requires knowledge of component fluxes, including photosynthetic uptake and respiratory loss. Experimental separation of soil respiration into heterotrophic and rhizosphere respiration has been difficult, complicating efforts to quantify management and environmental effects on grazing land C sequestration.

Birds pose serious hazards at United States airports because of the potential for collisions with aircraft. Raptors, in particular, are hazardous to aircraft safety due to their size, hunting behavior, and hovering and soaring habits. Reduction of rodent populations at an airport may decrease raptor populations in the area and, therefore, reduce risk that raptors pose to aircraft.

Carl Malmström's historical forest maps of the province of Halland, in south-western Sweden, were published over 70 years ago, but are still important to science and conservation.

Historically monitoring of grazing impacts in rangelands has been seriously compromised by the small area, infrequency and variability of field-based sampling plots.

The relative magnitudes of, and factors controlling, denitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) were measured in the soil of a re-connected temperate floodplain divided into four different land management zones (grazing grassland, hay meadow, fritillary meadow and a buffer zone).

The productivity of semi-arid rangelands on the Arabian Peninsula is spatially and temporally highly variable, and increasing grazing pressure as well as the likely effects of climatic change further threatens vegetation resources.

Steppe, an important belt to protect North China from dust storms, is vulnerable and has been degraded in recent decades because of climatic change and heavy grazing.

Intensive overgrazing, practiced for the last decades in Inner Mongolia, has led to serious grassland degradation and deterioration of soil structure. As a consequence, the soil gas and water fluxes and therefore soil functions were affected by grazing.

Proteins comprise one of the largest N inputs to soils. There is, therefore, a need to investigate the factors involved in the inputs and fate of proteins in soil. While land use management is expected to influence the amount and diversity of soil proteins, the responses of protein as a source of mineralizable N to land use changes have not yet been studied.