The proposals have also drawn anger from the energy industry. Kathleen Sgamma, a director of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents 400 oil and natural-gas companies, said the new policy could block some promising lands from drilling. “They’re treating lands arbitrarily as de facto wildernesses,” she said. And Dean Heller, a Republican representative from Nevada, said: “The message of th...

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Maine, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for " fair use " copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Librarian. It is understood that any copying or publication of this thesis for financial...

Warming temperatures cause temporal changes in growing seasons and prey abundance that drive earlier breeding by birds, especially dietary specialists within homogeneous habitat. Less is known about how generalists respond to climate-associated shifts in growing seasons or prey phenology, which may occur at different rates across land cover types. We studied whether breeding phenology of a gene...

Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear...

In order to evaluate the landscape and its agrarian components in the low mountainous region of the Alpujarras in Southeastern Spain, Conjoint Analysis (C.A.) was used, and both ranking and rating approaches were considered as a way of assessing preferences. Data was obtained from a preference test carried out with a sample survey of 165 visitors to the area. Three main landscape components wer...

Large tracts of abandoned urban land, resulting from the deindustrialization of metropolitan areas, are generating a renewed interest among city planners and community organizations envisioning the productive use of this land not only to produce fresh food but to effectively manage stormwater and mitigate the impact of urban heat islands. Healthy and productive soils are paramount to meet these...

In the present paper, we investigated the effects of afforestation on nitrogen fractions and microbial communities. A total of 24 soil samples were collected from farmland (FL) and three afforested lands, namely Robinia pseudoacacia L (RP), Caragana korshinskii Kom (CK), and abandoned land (AL), which have been arable for the past 40 years. Quantitative PCR and Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA g...