Recent preoccupations regarding possible negative effects of pollution, inappropriate land management, climate change, desertification, erosion, compaction or over-exploitation on soils has led to initiatives for the survey of soils. One of them, EcoFINDERS, launched a pan-European survey in order to define normal operating ranges for soil biodiversity and quality, through the use of several methodologies.

Stonefly samples were collected from disturbed and undisturbed regions of two river basins, tributaries of the Upper Váh River basin (the West Carpathians). Water temperature, oxygen content, coarse benthic matter and some stonefly metrics (abundance, biomass, richness, index of diversity, % predators, % shredders, stonefly total score and stonefly average score) were all negatively influenced by the extent of urban and field land cover.

This paper represents the first national effort of its kind to systematically investigate the impact of changes in climate and land use and land cover (LULC) on the carbon cycle with high-resolution dynamic LULC data at the decadal scale (1990s and 2000s).

Spatial heterogeneities of vegetation and soil can strongly affect ecological functions of ecosystems, particularly for arid and semi-arid ecosystems where vegetation has a patchy distribution and livestock grazing is one of the major land use types. However, little is known about the impact of grazing on spatial patterns of vegetation and soil, even though grazing has variously been shown to create, maintain or destroy those patterns.

The agricultural land classification (ALC) of England and Wales is a formal method of assessing the quality of agricultural land and guiding future land use. It assesses several soil, site and climate criteria and classifies land according to whichever is the most limiting. A common approach is required for calculating the necessary agroclimatic parameters over time in order to determine the effects of changes in the climate on land grading.

A „Gazdálkodás” 2010. évi 2. számában vitacikkem jelent meg „A földbirtok-politikaválaszt igénylő kérdései” címen. Ezzel az volt a célom, hogy a témakörrel kapcsolatban felvessek kérdéseket, leírjak megállapításokat, és ezzel egy olyan vitát generáljak, ami fórumot ad a tudományos közélet szereplőinek a megszólalásra, a vélemények ütköztetésére, egymás nézeteinek jobb megértésére, a politika számára javaslatok megfogalmazására.

The fragmentation of landholdings is considered as disturbing factor for agriculture. The aim of this article is to evaluate the extent of land fragmentation of the large landholdings in Estonia. The Januszewski and Schmook indexes were calculated for that purpose. The detailed survey of three agricultural landholdings was conducted in order to assess the possibilities to reduce the land fragmentation and improve their land use conditions. Results showed that Estonian agricultural producers’ landholdings are considerably fragmented.