Understanding the relationship between land use change and ecosystem service values (ESVs) is the key for improving ecosystem health and sustainability. This study estimated the spatial and temporal variations of ESVs at town scale in relation to land use change in the Loess Plateau which is characterized by its environmental vulnerability, then analyzed and discussed the relationship between E...

Objective: The aim of this study is to provide a management plan for the Sykan watershed of Darre shahr city located in Ilam province using GIS in land use planning. Methods: For land using of Sykan watershed of Ilam province with about 9 hectares area, map of classes, elevation, percent slope, geographical aspects, soil characteristics, vegetation density and the final map units were combined ...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of agricultural soil. Understanding the storage of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) helps us understand how ecosystems would respond to natural and anthropogenic disturbances under different management strategies. Although the quantity of SOC stocks in the Loess Plateau has been previously investigated, the distribution and storage of C in its deep...

Understanding the processes of historical land-use change is crucial to the research of global environmental sustainability. Here we examine and attempt to disentangle the evolutionary interactions between land-use change and its underlying causes through a historical lens. We compiled and synthesized historical land-use change and various biophysical, political, socioeconomic, and technical da...

The effect of agricultural land use change on soil microbial community composition and biomass remains a widely debated topic. Here, we investigated soil microbial community composition and biomass [e.g., bacteria (B), fungi (F), Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and Actinomycete (ACT)] using phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs) analysis, and basal microbial respiration in afforested, cropland and...

Land cover plays an important role in the climate and biogeochemistry of the Earth system. It is of great significance to produce and evaluate the global land cover (GLC) data when applying the data to the practice at a specific spatial scale. The objective of this study is to evaluate and validate the consistency of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land cover product (...

This study presents a global scale analysis of cropping intensity, crop duration and fallow land extent computed by using the global dataset on monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas MIRCA2000. MIRCA2000 was mainly derived from census data and crop calendars from literature. Global cropland extent was 16 million km around the year 2000 of which 4.4 million km (28%) was fallow, resulting in an...

A description of Kentucky's land base indicates that of nearly 15 million acres suitable for cropland usage, approximately three-fourths bas an erosion hazard potential of some degree, relating largely to steepness of slope (1). For this reason, there is a large potential acreage of alfalfa and other perennial forage crops relating to their sod forming growth habit which provides them an inhere...