Degraded lands have often been suggested as a solution to issues of land scarcity and as an ideal way to meet mounting global demands for agricultural goods, but their locations and conditions are not well known. Four approaches have been used to assess degraded lands at the global scale: expert opinion, satellite observation, biophysical models, and taking inventory of abandoned agricultural l...

Article history: Received 8 February 2007 Received in revised form 4 December 2007 Accepted 4 December 2007 Fire is an important land management tool for smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon. However, when fires are not properly controlled they can give rise to large-scale wildfires that threaten forests, agricultural plantations, and settlement areas. We use data from a survey of 220 household...

Over the past two decades many countries have undertaken to decentralize government functions and transfer authority and responsibilities from central to intermediate and local governments, and often to communities and the private sector. Decentralization is potentially important to agricultural knowledge and information systems, but decentralization is not an end in itself, and successful dece...

Over the past century, agricultural landscapes worldwide have increasingly been managed for the primary purpose of producing food, while other diverse ecosystem services potentially available from these landscapes have often been undervalued and diminished. The incorporation of relatively small amounts of perennial vegetation in strategic locations within agricultural landscapes dominated by an...

Historical agricultural practices have severely undermined the recreational quality and ecological integrity of Midwestern streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Reestablishing riparian forest corridors would create wetland buffers partially protecting water quality and aquatic ecosystems from agricultural runoff. On the basis of an explicitly spatial market-failure model of land use in the riparian ...

Prior to deforestation, São Paulo State had 79,000 km(2) covered by Cerrado (Brazilian savanna) physiognomies, but today less than 8.5% of this biodiversity hotspot remains, mostly in private lands. The global demand for agricultural goods has imposed strong pressure on natural areas, and the economic decisions of agribusiness managers are crucial to the fate of Cerrado domain remaining areas (...

This paper combines theory from ecology and anthropology to investigate variation in the territory sizes of subsistence oriented agricultural societies. The results indicate that population and the dependence of individuals within a society on "wild" foods partly determine the territory sizes of agricultural societies. In contrast, the productivity of an agroecosystem is not an important determ...

Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2 Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands, 3 Land Resources Unit, Joint Research Centre, Directorate for Sustainable Resources, European Commission, Ispra, Italy, Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Lund University, Lund...

Over the past decade, donors have made a concerted effort to improve aid effectiveness. This intent was codified by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the Paris Declaration of 2005, under which development agencies agreed to manage their aid budgets on the basis of five principles, two of which included managing development fund...

Abstract Over the past three decades, tariff protection to farmers has fallen and partly been replaced by domestic support, whilst support for in some emerging economies grown. Against that backdrop, this paper provides new estimates of national economic impacts global agricultural tariffs supports. Using latest economy-wide GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) model calibrated 2017, we simulat...