Biodiversity plays a crucial role in stability and productivity of natural ecosystem. The main goal of this research was to classify ecological groups in steppe rangeland and investigate their relationships with plant diversity indices. Therefore, fifty different Land Unit Tracts (LUT) were identified in Khod-Neuk basin, Yazd province, Iran, in 2010. Vegetation and soil samples were taken in th...

The complexity of natural resource management is increasingly recognized and requires adaptive governance at multiple levels. It is particularly significant to explore the impacts of government interventions on the management practices of local communities and on target social-ecological systems. The Inner Mongolian rangeland was traditionally managed by indigenous people using their own instit...

In the Anthropocene, coupled human and natural systems dominate and only a few natural systems remain relatively unaffected by human influence. On the one hand, conservation criteria based on areas of minimal human impact are not relevant to much of the biosphere. On the other hand, conservation criteria based on economic factors are problematic with respect to their ability to arrive at operat...

769 Humans have long been fascinated by the dynamism of free-flowing waters. Yet we have expended great effort to tame rivers for transportation, water supply, flood control, agriculture, and power generation. It is now recognized that harnessing of streams and rivers comes at great cost: Many rivers no longer support socially valued native species or sustain healthy ecosystems that provide imp...

Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The re...

Law plays an essential role in shaping natural resource and environmental policy, but unfortunately, many environmental laws were developed around the prevailing scientific understanding that there was a “balance of nature” that could be managed and sustained. This view assumes that natural resource managers have the capacity to predict the behavior of ecological systems, know what its importan...

Theoretical ecology uses conceptual and mathematical models, computer simulations, and data analysis to study ecological systems. Alan Hastings, a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis, has contributed significantly to the development of this field over the past four decades. Much of his research uses mathematical models of population...

Has the science of ecology fulfilled the promises made by the originators of ecological science at the start of the last century? What should ecology achieve? Have good policies for environmental management flowed out of ecological science? These important questions are rarely discussed by ecologists working on detailed studies of individual systems. Until we decide what we wish to achieve as e...

Managing the numerous and interrelated processes between man and nature in order to use renewable resources in a sustainable way is confronted with conflicting objectives, external effects, complex interdependencies, uncertainty and other features that make it nearly impossible to come to unambiguous optimal decisions. Self-organization in socio-economic and ecological systems the process of st...