Salinization and sodication are abiotic soil factors, important hazards to soil fertility and consequently affect the crop production. Soil salinization is of great concern for irrigated agriculture in arid and semi‐arid regions of the world; sodicity is characterized by an excessively high concentration of sodium (Na) in their cation exchange system. In recent times, attention has been turned to study the impacts of these factors (salinity and sodicity) on soil microbial activities.

Regular economic activity takes into account ecosystem goods and services that are exchanged for money in the market (e.g. food, fibre, water) but normally ignores more intangible ones left away from market transactions (e.g. soil protection, climate regulation, disturbance control, habitat provision), even in cases when they become irreversibly impaired.

Soil organic carbon (OC) storage across regions is influenced by climate and parent materials, which determine soil properties like clay content and mineralogy. Within homogeneous soil regions, land use and management practices are further important controls for soil OC contents and turnover.

Despite general agreement on antagonist relationships between ecosystems capacity to simultaneously sustain the availability of regulating services and agricultural production, it is not clear how these tradeoffs operate in response to complexity loss at the rural landscapes level. Here we present a novel evaluation framework of ecosystem services (ES) and pose different response models to landscape complexity.

By altering fluxes of heat, momentum, and moisture exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere, forestry and other land‐use activities affect climate. Although long recognized scientifically as being important, these so‐called biogeophysical forcings are rarely included in climate policies for forestry and other land management projects due to the many challenges associated with their quantification.

Faced with the low success rates of protected areas in conserving natural forests and supporting rural development, the Malagasy government recently chose to transfer forest resource management to local communities. Feedback about the implementation of this new policy suggests that agriculture continues to drive deforestation. This article explores farmers' household livelihood strategies and land use changes in response to changing forest access rules arising from community-based land management.

As species' geographic ranges and ecosystem functions are altered in response to climate change, there is a need to integrate biodiversity conservation approaches that promote natural adaptation into land use planning. Successful conservation will need to embrace multiple climate adaptation approaches, but to date they have not been conveyed in an integrated way to help support immediate conservation planning and action in the face of inherent spatial uncertainty about future conditions.

Recently, studies on land consolidation and valuation in farm lands have became more important due to a new soil conservation law (2005, 5403 numbered) and European Union Integration processes in our country. However, each soil group determined by morphometric system in agricultural lands have its own land use and management practices. Description and determination of soil properties are not sufficiently made by considering old soil classification system. Nowadays, Soil Taxonomy preferred by many countries in the world has been used for soil classification.

Conservation efforts often require site or parcel selection strategies that lead to spatially cohesive reserves. Although habitat contiguity is thought to be conducive to the persistence of many sensitive species, availability of funding and suitable land may restrict the extent to which this spatial attribute can be pursued in land management or conservation. Using optimization modeling, we explore the economic and spatial tradeoffs of retaining or restoring grassland habitat in contiguous patches of various sizes near the Chicago metropolitan area.