The Sloping Land Conversion Program (also known as "Grain for Green" or the Upland Conversion Program) for converting cropland to forest is one of China's most ambitious environmental initiatives, and is one of the world's largest land-conservation programs with a budget of RMB 337 billion (over US$ 40 billion). Although environmental impacts have played a vital role in the general reasoning an...

Although it is difficult, many countries are attempting to balance economic development and cultivated land preservation for various reasons. China’s experience is a good illustration of such challenges during rapid economic development and urbanization. The central government of China emphasized the high self-sufficiency ratio of grain and therefore set a bottom-line for the area of cultivated...

The Southern Andean Yungas in Northwest Argentina constitute one of the main biodiversity hotspots in the world. Considerable changes in land use have taken place in this ecoregion, predominantly related to forest conversion to croplands, inducing losses in above-ground biodiversity and with potential impact on soil microbial communities. In this study, we used high-throughput pyrosequencing of...

Nascent U.S. carbon markets reward farmers for reforesting agricultural land, with consequent ecological co-benefits. We use a dynamic optimization model to determine the likelihood of an orchard farmer in northern California converting to forest under 90 plausible future scenarios. We find reforestation to be a highly unlikely outcome, occurring only 18.5% of the time under the most favorable ...

A monthly rainfall-runoff model was calibrated for a large tropical catchment in southern India. Various land-use and climatic change scenarios were tested to assess their effects on mean annual runoff and assured water yield at the Bhavanisagar Reservoir in Tamil Nadu, India. The largest increase in runoff (19%) came from converting forest and savanna (the indigenous control scenario) to agric...

nowadays, a noticeable part of areas with high development in different regions of the world is urban centers with touristy attractions. thus, in these cities, urban development comes forth as a basic challenge to decision makers and local planners. the aim of this research is to identify the driving forces which affect urban growth in the sareyn town, as one of the best known touristy centers ...

Ecological land is like the "liver" of a city and is very useful to public health. Ecological land change is a spatially dynamic non-linear process under the interaction between natural and anthropogenic factors at different scales. In this study, by setting up natural development scenario, object orientation scenario and ecosystem priority scenario, a Cellular Automation (CA) model has been es...