In Latin America countries, competition for access to natural resources among different groups has been a major reason for the outburst of violence over the last decades. One of the main aims of the political ecology concerns the understanding of the environmental conditions that can underlies the social conflict among people. Such understanding needs to be based on a detailed investigation of the natural resources of the landscape, mainly the soils.

Turkey is homeland of the grapevine (Vitis spp.), one of the most important agricultural products in the World. Our country, having the favorable climatic conditions for viticulture, has an important role among the viticulture farming countries of the World. The objective of this study is to determine potential growing areas of grape in Turkey by using Geographic Information Systems techniques based on topographic and climatic factors. It is important to efficiently use of our limited arable lands from the agricultural point of view.

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.

Pasture degradation is one of the major environmental and economic problems of Brazilian livestock production. Based on the estimates of soil loss in 140,297 km² pasturelands of Goiás State and the Federal District, the effects of land use and management and conservation practices on soil erosion by water were evaluated. Soil loss was estimated with the empirical revised universal soil loss equation model under four scenarios of land use and management of pastures and the implementation of terraces. The effects of converting hilly areas into permanently preserved areas were also evaluated.

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.

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.