Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature.

Floods exert significant pressure on human societies. Assessments of an ecosystem's capacity to regulate and to prevent floods relative to human demands for flood regulating ecosystem services can provide important information for environmental management. In this study, the capacities of different ecosystems to regulate floods were assessed through investigations of water retention functions of the vegetation and soil cover.

Forest fire is a major cause of changes in forest structure and function. Among various floristic regions, the northeast region of India suffers maximum from the fires due to age-old practice of shifting cultivation and spread of fires from jhum fields. For proper mitigation and management, an early warning of forest fires through risk modeling is required. The study results demonstrate the potential use of remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) in identifying forest fire prone areas in Manipur, southeastern part of Northeast India.

The main objective of this study was to investigate changing of land uses and land covers and to compare current conditions of the basin with project results that were performed in 1961-2006 and to determine some soil properties of the basin. Stand relating to 1995 and 2006, geological and topographical maps and climatic data were used in this study. According to results, while forest area covered 14.5 % of the total area in 1955 was increased (35.8 %), degraded coppice, degraded blackpine and agricultural lands were decreased 5.7, 1.8 and 15.8% respectively.

Urban planners are increasingly interested in agriculture around cities and have to decide whether to maintain or not areas of agricultural land use within and close to growing cities. There is therefore a need for researchers to design tools to guide public decision-making on land use. Various approaches, originating from different disciplines, may be adopted in this respect. We designed an interdisciplinary research program in order to test two related concepts: the “sustainability” and the “multi-functionality” of agriculture.

The paper gives an overview of the directions and results of research carried out in geodesy and land management at the Latvia University of Agriculture from the year 1939, when the Surveying Department (later the Department of Geodesy) was established, up to the present day. Since the beginnings of the Department, researches in geodesy have been associated with problems of precise levelling: vertical movements of the earth crust, deformation of buildings and structures, as well as accuracy evaluation of geodetic instruments.

Soil pH plays an important role in biogeochemical processes in soils. The spatial distribution of soil pH provides basic and useful information relevant to soil management and agricultural production. To obtain an accurate distribution map of soil pH on the Loess Plateau of China, 382 sampling sites were investigated throughout the region and four interpolation methods, i.e., inverse distance weighting (IDW), splines, ordinary kriging, and cokriging, were applied to produce a continuous soil pH surface.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 2001 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) was compared to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) 2002 Census of Agriculture. We compared areal estimates for cropland at the state and county level for 14 States in the Upper Midwest region of the United States. Absolute differences between the NLCD and Census cropland areal estimates at the state level ranged from 1.3% (Minnesota) to 37.0% (Wisconsin). The majority of counties (74.5%) had differences of less than 100km². 7.2% of the counties had differences of more than 200km².

AIMS: The aims of this study were to identify areas of wind erosion and dust deposition and to quantify the effects of different grazing intensities on soil redistribution rates in grasslands based on the 137Cs technique. Because the method uses a reference inventory as threshold for erosion or deposition, the classification of any other site as source or sink for dust depends on the accurate selection of this reference site.

A Web-based system is presented, integrating spatial information from remote sensing images, GPS measurements and inventory data. Monitoring, research and management of the grape production at Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil (624,000 metric tons in 2006) can be done through a system entirely based in open-source codes.

Land degradation and their restoration are emerging issues all over the world for the environmental management. In this study, degraded sodic land was rehabilitated through afforestation and cropping for 50years.