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Showing items 1 through 9 of 637.

Library Resource

Dynamics of soil carbon stock, total nitrogen, and associated soil properties since the conversion of Acacia woodland to managed pastureland, parkland agroforestry, and treeless cropland in the Jido Komolcha District, southern Ethiopia

Journal Articles & Books
April, 2016
Ethiopia, Africa, Eastern Africa
land use
In the arid, low biomass producing areas of Ethiopia, Acacia woodlands suffered a severe degradation due to exploitation for various uses, and conversion to grazing and cultivated lands. However, little is known on the impact of agricultural land uses on soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN) stocks, and other soil quality indicators. This study was planned to evaluate SOC and TN stock changes under parkland agroforestry (PAF), managed pastureland (MPL), and treeless cropland (TLCL) regimes by considering the remnant protected woodland (PWL) as a reference.
Library Resource

Drivers of groundwater use and technical efficiency of groundwater, canal water, and conjunctive use in Pakistan’s Indus Basin Irrigation System

Journal Articles & Books
January, 2016
Pakistan, South-Eastern Asia
This paper explores the major determinants of heavy reliance on groundwater and the extent to which conjunctive use of ground and surface water affects the production efficiency of Pakistan’s irrigators. The results show that the major drivers of groundwater use in Pakistan’s agriculture are the variability and uncertainty associated with surface water delivery and that any effort to address the groundwater–energy nexus challenge should first consider fixing the problems associated with surface water supplies.
Library Resource

Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on-farm conservation projects?

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2015
Smallholder farmers who grow diverse landraces in centres of crop diversity contribute to sustaining the capacity of agricultural and food systems to adapt to change by maintaining crop evolution in their fields today, thus enabling humanity to continue to have the broad genetic variation needed to adapt crops to changes tomorrow. Given this fact, the last 20 years have witnessed an ever-growing interest in on-farm conservation of crop infra-specific diversity.
Library Resource

Balanced nutrient management for crop intensification and livelihood improvement: A case study from watershed in Andhra Pradesh, India

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2014
Soil health assessment of farmers’ fields in watershed villages in Medak district, Andhra Pradesh, India showed widespread deficiencies of sulfur (S), boron (B), and zinc (Zn) in addition to organic carbon and phosphorus (P). Participatory on-farm trials on soil test-based application of deficient Zn, B, and S along with nitrogen (N) and P during 2009 to 2012 significantly increased crop yields over farmers’ practice (FP)—by 31% to 45% in chickpea, 15% to 16% in cotton, 12% to 15% in paddy, and 8% to 9% in sugarcane.
Library Resource

Land Change Dynamics

Insights from Intensity Analysis Applied to an African Emerging City

Reports & Research
Journal Articles & Books
December, 2017
Rwanda, Africa
Urban Tenure
urbanization
land use
Land change in Kigali, Rwanda, is examined using Intensity Analysis, which measures the temporal stationarity of changes among categories. Maps for 1981, 2002 and 2014 were produced that show the land categories Built, Vegetated and Other, which is composed mainly of croplands and bare surfaces. Land change accelerated from the first time interval (1981–2002) to the second time interval (2002–2014), as increased human and economic activities drove land transformation.
Library Resource

Agricultural Land Investments and Water Management in the Office du Niger, Mali

Options for Improved Water Pricing

Reports & Research
Journal Articles & Books
June, 2016
Mali, Africa
Large-scale agricultural land investments in Africa are often considered solely from the land perspective. Yet land, water and other natural resources are closely interlinked in agricultural production and in sustaining rural livelihoods. Such investments involving irrigation will potentially have implications for water availability and utilization by other users, making it imperative to regard water as an economic rather than a free good.
Library Resource

Estimating vertical error of SRTM and map-based DEMs using ICESat altimetry data in the eastern Tibetan Plateau

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2011
China
land cover
The Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) instrument onboard the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provides elevation data with very high accuracy which can be used as ground data to evaluate the vertical accuracy of an existing Digital Elevation Model (DEM). In this article, we examine the differences between ICESat elevation data (from the 1064 nm channel) and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM of 3 arcsec resolution (90 m) and map-based DEMs in the Qinghai-Tibet (or Tibetan) Plateau, China.
Library Resource

benefits of considering land cover seasonality in multi-spectral image classification

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2012
land cover
Effects of incorporating multi-seasonal information into image classifications for large-scale land cover mapping are investigated. Data from four Landsat7 ETM+ scenes (March, May, June 2002, September 1999) were included step-wise into classifications by discriminant analysis to document their relevance for classification accuracy. The classification using all four images reached a maximum accuracy of 69.2%, significantly higher compared with single-date classifications and showing less fluctuations in classification accuracy.
Library Resource

Trapped between antiquity and urbanism – a multi-criteria assessment model of the greater Cairo Metropolitan area

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2011
Egypt
Urban Tenure
urbanization
land cover
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.Naguib MahfouzThis article attempts to provide systematic policy information regarding land use/land cover change in the vicinity of the Giza Pyramids in Egypt.
Library Resource

Formalized interpretation of compound land use objects – Mapping historical summer farms from a single satellite image

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2012
land cover
land use
Notions of land cover relating to physical landscape characters are readily captured by satellite imagery. Land use on the other hand relates more to the societal aspects of a landscape. We argue that much of the spatial configuration of landscape characters is related to land use and that satellite data can be used to represent and investigate interpretations of land use. We propose and demonstrate the joint use of a novel SRPC procedure for satellite imagery together with an explicit representation of category semantics.