The farming community, in many parts of Australia, is widely dispersed and heavily dependent upon communication both within the community and outside. In this preliminary paper we explore the information needs and information flows of the rural sector and consider the farm as the potential focus of a virtual community. A virtual community may form a basis both for electronic commerce, in the tr...

A forest is a biotic community predominated by trees and woody vegetation that are signifi cantly taller, greater, thicker, and deeper than other vegetation types and generally covers a large area (Chang, 2003). Forests cover approximately 26.2% of the world, with 45.7% of Latin America and the Caribbean being covered, 35% of East Asia and the Pacifi c, and 35% of the European Union. Canada and...

Urban agriculture is recently being recognized as a distinctive urban land use contributing to greenspaces and food security. The land inventory forms the critical first step in identifying sites for urban agriculture. The authors’ analysis greatly expands on prior land inventory strategies, first analyzing land cover to identify all open areas available for siting urban agriculture. Then in GI...

Sustainable food production system is the key to sustainable development especially for hill communities where agriculture is the mainstay of economy. History shows that human societies that can protect their livelihood-based natural resources are able to sustain themselves. So even today we find several indigenous communities obtaining sustained and adequate income/returns from their agricultu...

Urban agriculture has been recently highlighted with the increased importance for recreation in modern society; however, soil quality and public health may not be guaranteed because of continuous exposure to various pollutants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the soil quality of urban agriculture by soil microbial assessments. Two independent variables, organic and inorganic fertili...

Habitat fragmentation can change the community composition of species in remnant habitat patches. We studied the impacts of fragmentation by agriculture on the bird community in heavily fragmented areas of the sagebrush shrubsteppe in western North America. We examined whether bird communities in sagebrush habitat near orchards and vineyards were different from the community in interior sagebru...