We review the current status of experimental studies in India to understand the linkages between afforestation and hydrology. This discipline deals with the use and management of water, social awareness of environmental problems, and ecosystem limitations on provision of watershed services by river basins in the mountain regions of India.

Soil erosion in southeast Spain is a complex process due to strong interactions between biophysical and human components. Significant progress has been achieved in the understanding of soil hydrological behavior, despite the fact that most investigations were focused on the experimental plot scale. Although experimental plots allow exploring the effect of multiple biophysical and anthropogenic factors, they provide limited insights in the combined effect of all factors acting together at the landscape scale.

Vegetation type is one of many factors that affect watershed hydrology and is an especially important influence on surface hydrological processes. Canopy and ground cover vegetation provide a natural cushion against the impact energy of rainfall in headwater portions of a stream basin, increasing water filtration into the soil and reducing surface runoff, but effects of different vegetation types are not fully understood. We sought to evaluate the capacity of different vegetation communities to regulate surface runoff in an alpine landscape.

Five main drivers of population declines have been identified: climate change, habitat degradation, invasive alien species (IAS), overexploitation and pollution. Each of these drivers interacts with the others, and also with the intrinsic traits of individual species, to determine species’ distribution and range dynamics.

The urban heat island effect poses a challenge in several cities, and may affect human and ecosystem health. It was proven that relatively small urban conglomerations in mid-latitudes, such as the case study region of Rostock, have undergone a considerable effect recently, noticeable particularly in the warm season. Due to climatic changes, these effects are expected to alter in intensity and/or frequency. This was investigated using a model that focuses on interactions between land use and surface temperatures and on specific air conditions in cities.

CONTEXT: Expansion of bioenergy production is part of a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. Dedicated biomass crops will compete with other land uses as most high quality arable land is already used for agriculture, urban development, and biodiversity conservation. OBJECTIVE: First, we explore the trade-offs between converting land enrolled in the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to switchgrass for biofuel production or preserving it for biodiversity.

Modern ecological models often account for the influence of the surrounding environment by using landscape pattern indices (LPIs) as measures of landscape structure. Ideally, the landscape samples from which these LPIs are extracted should be centered on the locations where the response variable was measured. However, in situations where this is not possible due to a lack of adequate full-coverage landcover data, the question arises as to what degree this circumstance creates a bias in the value of the LPIs, thereby obscuring their relation with the response variable.

CONTEXT: Land-use change is a global phenomenon with potential to generate abrupt spatial changes in species’ distributions. OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether theory about the internal structure of bird species’ geographic ranges can be refined to reflect abrupt changes in distribution and abundance associated with human influences on landscapes, and whether the prevalence and diversity of bird–landscape threshold relationships may significantly complicate assemblage-level avian conservation.

In Peru, a new forest reform process laid the foundation for the establishment of a large sector of private small and medium-sized forest enterprises to practice responsible forest management. This paper analyzes the influence of a newly established concession system on forest landscape change. Specifically, the paper examines whether the concession system promoted and increased land-cover changes and changed fragmentation patterns between 2001 and 2010.

The degradation of aquatic habitats has increasingly become one of the most important factors influencing the distribution of freshwater species worldwide. We analysed the occurrence of three crayfish species, Astacus astacus, Austropotamobius torrentium and Orconectes limosus, in relation to habitat degradation status (based on Directive 2000/60/ES), stream morphology, geographical characteristics and land cover. In total, we analysed 6,768 sites within the Czech Republic (Central Europe), of which 6,187 sites lacked crayfish; among the remainder, A. astacus was present in 507 sites, O.

Standard data products from NASA’s moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) were available at launch (collection 3) and have undergone two revisions (collections 4 and 5) during the continuing Terra and Aqua missions. In 2000, a research project was conducted in large fields of corn and soybean to evaluate MODIS leaf area index (LAI) and land cover type (MOD15 and MOD12 data products, respectively) as input to crop yield models. Our objective was to compare collections 3, 4 and 5 with the ground data to determine data product improvement.

Crop rotation is one of the important decisions made independently by numerous farm managers, and is a critical variable in models of crop growth and soil carbon. In Iowa and much of the Midwestern United States (US), the typical management decision is to rotate corn and soybean crops for a single field; therefore, the land-cover changes each year even though the total area of agricultural land-use remains the same. The price for corn increased from 2001 to 2010, which increased corn production in Iowa.