Treesearch

Biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates through destruction of habitats and ecosystems for short-term economic gain. Concern about this has led governments, multilateral organizations, scientists, environmentalists, and others to look for ways to promote the conservation of biodiversity. This concern has led to the development of rapid biodiversity assessment approaches based on indigenous knowledge of the local people to provide information on biodiversity suitable for use in conservation planning and environmental monitoring. The study, which was funded by UNDP/GEF Cross-Border...

The Ball State University Land Design Institute (LDI) pursues ecologically and culturally sustainable land design through education, research, outreach, and demonstration. LDI seeks to lead communities (local, regional, global) to sustainable futures. It connects communities and sustainability experts to optimize education about land management, planning, and design for sustainability; and innovative monitoring approaches and technologies for measuring ecosystem implications of these activities. LDI is building its biome-based global network, including inter-national sustainability...

The study is based in the Environmental Protection Area of Guaraqueçaba located in the Atlantic Forest of the State of Paraná, southern Brazil. EPAs in Brazil allow private ownership, resource extraction, and agriculture according to predefined land use laws. A systems’ approach was adopted to define the main interacting variables needed to understand the local socio-economic context and the causes of an observed increase in illegal activities. The Atlantic Forest is of particular importance as it was declared a “hotspot” in 1992 for its endemic biodiversity and high risk of destruction;...

The term “Anthropocene” defines the current, human-dominated, geological epoch of human-caused environmental influences. Some researchers believe that the beginning of this epoch coincides with the inception of the Industrial Revolution (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Research is revealing that humans have affected environments on global and local scales for millennia. Contention over land management often hinges on disparate beliefs about the environment and the ways in which policy makers and the public visualize the past. There is a need to communicate the complexities of anthropogenic...

The 170,000 km2 interior floodplain of the Middle Niger (Mali) is a tight mosaic of alluvial and desert microenvironments. The interannual to intermillennial climate change profiles of this fluvial anomaly thrust deep into the Sahel and southern Sahara are masterpieces of abrupt phase shifts and unpredictability. Response has been of two kinds. The Office du Niger was France’s largest colonial-period development project--and a failure of massive proportions. An older tradition of Social Memory allowed for the integration of increasingly- specialized producers and artisans in a generalized...

Community based monitoring (CBM) is often directed at examining significant environmental impacts arising from the activities of industry. When industry is included as one of the active partners or stakeholders participating in CBM the results of monitoring are shared and there is a good opportunity to inform decision makers in ways that lead to positive outcomes. Too often, however, there is an antagonistic relationship between those undertaking environmental monitoring and those managing industry. CBM provides an alternative by utilizing an inclusive process that ensures communication...

Use of N management zones appears to be a practical method of revealing dominant patterns of residual soil nitrate in North Dakota crop fields, where fall soil nitrate sampling is a common N management tool. Delineation of zone boundaries to date has been a largely subjective process. A weighted, classified method of delineating nitrogen management zones is presented. Soil electrical conductivity sensor measurements, aerial color photography, Landsat 7 satellite NDVI imagery, and yield maps were divided into five classes using natural break algorithms to separate data into classes. Five...

Availability of land is fundamental for sustainable forestry, providing the basis for the production of a wide array of goods and services (for example, biodiversity, forest carbon sequestration). This paper summarizes types of land-related data contained in major U.S. data bases, and gives examples of how such data were used in projecting changes in forest area for use in regional and national studies of forest sustainability. Forest land values are discussed, considering a variety of geographic, biological, regulatory, economic, and social situations. Forest land values provide informatio...

The emergence of industrial life support systems in the last three centuries dramatically changed humanenvironmental relationships. Industrial landscapes are repositories of historical knowledge about this ecological revolution. The key components of industrial landscapes include landforms (for example, waste rock dumps from mines), industrial buildings and structures, vegetation and other biotic patterns, spatial organization such as settlement patterns, transportation networks such as railroads and canals, and small-scale components such as fences and mining claim markers. Industrial...

Use and sustainability of rangelands are inherently linked to the health and sustainability of the land. They are also inherently linked to the social and economic infrastructures that complement and support those rangelands and rangeland uses. Ecological systems and processes provide the biological interactions underlying ecosystem health and viability. Social and economic infrastructures and processes provide the framework or context in which rangeland use occurs and continues. All these systems and processes interact and feedback on each other over time and space. To look at rangeland...