Capsule The bioclimatic zone and habitat type within which birds winter are the most important determinants of population trends.Aims To investigate whether regional factors on wintering grounds, phenological mismatch, or habitat on breeding or wintering grounds show relationships with population changes of Afro-Palaearctic migrant birds.Methods We modelled breeding bird survey trends of 26 species of Afro-Palaearctic migrant birds that breed in Britain, and assessed the most important variables.

Assessments of climate change impacts on agricultural markets and land‐use patterns rely on quantification of climate change impacts on the spatial patterns of land productivity. We supply a set of climate impact scenarios on agricultural land productivity derived from two climate models and two biophysical crop growth models to account for some of the uncertainty inherent in climate and impact models.

Human land use contributes significantly to the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in land management practices have been proposed as a critical and cost-effective mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the storage of additional carbon in vegetation and soils. However many discussions of the potential for land use to mitigate climate change only take into account biophysical factors such as vegetation and land cover and neglect how the agency of land owners themselves affects whether additional carbon storage can be achieved.

Climate change in the Mediterranean is expected to lead to lower total rainfall and soil moisture, together with higher storm intensities; different vegetation types are expected to react positively or negatively to these and other changes. Climate change could therefore have positive or negative impacts on runoff and soil erosion during storms, and previous research has indicated that the impacts could be different at the field, hillslope and catchment scales.

The paper presents the development and implementation of a decision support system (DSS) for wetland management in a river basin context under data scarce conditions. It is shown that by combining hydrological, socioeconomic, institutional and biological indicators in a participative approach, a better understanding of the interactions between the different factors affecting the “wetland socio-ecological system conditions” can be created. For this purpose, mathematical models, expert judgment and stakeholder preferences were combined into an integrated DSS framework.

Eastern Mediterranean ecosystems are prone to desertification when under grazing pressure. Therefore, management of grazing intensity plays a crucial role to avoid or to diminish land degradation and to sustain both livelihoods and ecosystem functioning. The dynamic land-use model LandSHIFT was applied to a case study on the country level for Jordan. The impacts of different stocking densities on the environment were assessed through a set of simulation experiments for various combinations of climate input and assumptions about the development of livestock numbers.

This work addresses increasing concerns about water management for rural productive activities in the vast dry regions of Latin America by assessing renewable energy technologies (RETs) that could be suitable for localized needs. Forecasted trends in climate change and variability make this analysis very relevant, in an area where very little published work exists. While Argentina is widely known for its fertile pampas, around 75 % of the country consists of dry lands. In addition, erosion is increasing by up to 650,000 hectares each year.

The nation's family forest lands can be an important contributor to carbon sequestration efforts. Yet very little is known about how family forest landowners view programs that enable them to sell carbon credits generated from the growth of their forest and the compensation that would be required to encourage a meaningful level of participation. To address this information gap, we conducted a study to identify and quantify family forest landowner interest in participating in a voluntary carbon market trading program in the Lake States, USA.

Freshwater temporary wetlands are a little-studied ecosystem worldwide. They have been recognised as critically endangered in south-eastern Australia under Australian biodiversity conservation legislation. However, little has been recorded about their hydrology, functioning or biodiversity values; i.e. the factors that make them intrinsically ‘swampy’.

Environmental targets are often used in planning for sustainable agricultural landscapes but their impacts are rarely known. In this paper we introduce landscape futures analysis as a method which combines linear programming optimisation with scenario analysis in quantifying the environmental, economic, and social impacts associated with achieving environmental targets, on a landscape scale. We applied the technique in the Lower Murray in southern Australia.

High nutrient loads are a widespread problem for many rivers and river catchments and cause damage to various ecological assets. Negative effects can be mitigated by changes in land management such as land use changes and/or implementation of intervention measures such as – amongst others – the construction of artificial wetlands and water treatment plants.