Suggestions that novel, non-food, dedicated biomass crops used to produce bioenergy may provide opportunities to diversify and reinstate biodiversity in intensively managed farmland have not yet been fully tested at the landscape scale. Using two of the largest, currently available landscape-scale biodiversity data sets from arable and biomass bioenergy crops, we take a taxonomic and functional...

Soil erosion is a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world's arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. With the addition of a quarter of a million people each day, the world population's food demand is increasing at a ti...

North Hebei province lies in the ecotone from agriculture to animal husbandry and forest and is eco-fragile transitional region. Serous land degradation, especially grassland degradation occurs in this area, because of overgrazing and over-reclamation. There are also many disasters, such as drought, dust storm, forest fire, and so on. This area has characteristics of ecological degradation and ...

Microalgae photobioreactor systems at the University of Dayton Research Institute’s (UDRI) Carbon Sequestration and Bio Fuel Laboratory are being used to investigate algae’s ability to capture CO2, clean wastewater, and produce algae biomass that can be used for carbon neutral biofuel generation. Algae cultivation is of interest because it does not require arable land or fresh water, and algae ...

Two geographers specializing in Russian agriculture and rural development present an exploratory essay on the phenomenon of agricultural land abandonment in the countryside of European Russia. A particular focus is on investigating the relative importance of physical conditions (fertility) and proximity to regional population centers in explaining the prevalence of land abandonment. A map depic...

We present the first assessment of the impact of land use change (LUC) to second-generation (2G) bioenergy crops on ecosystem services (ES) resolved spatially for Great Britain (GB). A systematic approach was used to assess available evidence on the impacts of LUC from arable, semi-improved grassland or woodland/forest, to 2G bioenergy crops, for which a quantitative 'threat matrix' was develop...

In Indian economy sugarcane has great contribution to GDP. A large population of India depends on the agriculture sector for livelihood. At, the same time, due to expanding population , diminishing arable land and rising service industry, there is need to increase the production by utilizing the available agriculture resources. This paper represents a linear goal programming model for sugarcane...