In Mongolia, nomadic herders have successfully been grazing livestock for more than a millennium. However, in recent years, concerns have increased that changes in management and higher livestock stocking rates may negatively affect vegetation and increase soil erosion, overland flow and sediment load of rivers. In addition, ambitious agricultural policies increase the intensity of agricultural land use thus enforcing a conversion of grassland to agricultural land which is far more susceptible to erosion.

Landscape: stake and tool for land use planning. For last decades, landscape has gradually become a stake of land use planning in Europe. The European Landscape Convention formalizes landscape as an issue of general interest and promotes a democratic landscape planning. However, landscape is rarely in practice the subject of pluridisciplinary and concerted approaches. So land use planning searches for a landscape concept able to gather together the various disciplinary and societal points of view. This federative concept can help it to build concerted policies of landscape planning.

This study presents a modeling tool to assess emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) from the agricultural sector as affected by land-use and residue utilization options. The overall purpose of this tool is twofold: (i) a spreadsheet model for comprehensive compilation of the direct and indirect emissions from land management, residue-burning and fossil fuel consumption through on-farm and off-farm operations and (ii) a decision support tool to explore economically viable mitigation options through detailed cost-benefit analysis of different technological options.

New tools for land use analysis including detailed cost-benefit assessments are needed to integrate resource management for enhancing farmers' income and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The paper comprises an assessment of GHG emissions and economic returns under different mitigation technologies in three rice growing regions in Asia, i.e., Ilocos Norte province (Philippines), Zhejiang province (China) and Haryana state (India).

Crop raiding by African elephants threatens human livelihoods and elephants, yet studies of long-term changes in crop raiding and effects on attitudes are lacking. The scope of perceived crop damage in three communities and local attitudes toward elephants and protected areas were surveyed in the Bénoué Wildlife Conservation Area, Cameroon in 2010. Temporal changes in attitudes and perceived crop damage were estimated using previous work. The percent of households reporting elephant crop raiding increased since 1997 (58% vs. 40%).

Significant transformation of agriculture took place in Central Europe during the second half of the 20 th century. The paper reviews the nature and consequences of this process in terms of grassland management and land use changes in the Liptov region (N Slovakia) and their impacts on plant communities of fen meadows (Caricion davallianae, Caricion fuscae), wet meadows (Calthion) and mesophilous grasslands (Arrhenatherion, Cynosurion). We studied in detail the changes in structure of the rare plant community Trollio-Cirsietum (Kühn 1937) Oberd.

CONTEXT: We studied the influence of human activities and climate change on water quantity and quality. Human activities included methods of agricultural policy, i.e. land use and management practices. OBJECTIVES: Finland started to follow EU’s agricultural policy in 1995. In this study our main objective was to find out whether the original targets of the Finnish Agri-Environmental Programme (FAEP) were achieved. METHODS: We analyzed trends in discharge, water quality and climate parameters in 37 years long time-series in two catchments.

The intent of this paper is to place the concepts of exposure, vulnerability, resilience and risk in the context of the consequences of global change for the sustainable development of small island developing states (SIDS). Many such states face a number of global climate change risks, such as an increase in the proportion of more intense storms, along with other global change threats that include energy security and costs.

The land use changes of İzmir Çeşme Coasts are determined by using remote sensing techniques in the period of 38 years. Temporal and spatial changes of land use are analyzed based on 3 land use maps which show 8 land use categories using the topographical maps and aerial photos in 1957-1976-1995. The dominancy of land use categories are calculated depending on grid map (1km x 1km). Each period of grid maps and land use maps are analyzed by spatial intersection method in GIS.

Nutrient mass balances have been used to assess a variety of land resource scenarios, at various scales. They are widely used as a simple basis for policy, planning, and regulatory decisions but it is not clear how accurately they reflect reality. This study provides a critique of broad-scale nutrient mass balances, with particular application to the fertiliser use of beef lot-feeding manure in Queensland.