The agriculture in low rainfall areas of eastern Rajasthan, India is characterized by high risks from drought, degraded natural resources and pervasive poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition. In this region, water is the main limiting factor for upgrading rainfed agriculture. For such areas integrated watershed management is recognized as a potential approach for agriculture growth and rehab...

Jovan, Sarah. 2008. Lichen bioindication of biodiversity, air quality, and climate: baseline results from monitoring in Washington, Oregon, and California. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-737. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 115 p. Lichens are highly valued ecological indicators known for their sensitivity to a wide variety of environmen...

The course examines natural resource issues affecting developing countries, and explores the impacts on communities, households, their decisions, and their health. Key resource use issues include water use (drinking, sanitation, and irrigation), agriculture (intensification, pesticide use, and land degradation), fuel wood scarcity, deforestation, conservation, and mining. For each of these issu...

Small size agricultural robots which are capable of sensing and manipulating the field environment are a promising approach towards more ecological, sustainable and human-friendly agriculture. This chapter proposes a machine vision approach for plant classification in the field and discusses its possible application in the context of robot based precision agriculture. The challenges of machine ...

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is an important factor in aquatic ecosystems, which is involved in a large variety of biogeochemical and ecological processes, and recent literature suggests that it could be strongly affected by agriculture in different climates. Based on novel monitoring techniques, we investigated the interaction of climate and agriculture effects on DOM quantity and quality. T...

Sustainability in agriculture has two dimensions: a. Natural Resource Sustainability b. Socioeconomic Sustainability Natural Resource Sustainability is based on the stability of the ecology of agricultural ecosystems based on interactions between soil, water and biodiversity. This Sustainability measures the wealth of' nature's economy' and the foundation of all other economies. Nature's econom...

The challenge of producing food for a rapidly increasing population in semi-arid agro-ecosystems in Southern Africa is daunting. More food necessarily means more consumptive use of so-called green water flow (vapour flow sustaining crop growth). Every increase in food production upstream in a watershed will impact on water user and using systems downstream. Intensifying agriculture has in the p...

This paper outlines a framework for understanding gameplay from the perspective of ecological psychology. According to this perspective, gameplay can be described in terms of perceiving, acting on and transforming the affordances that are related to a game system or to other players in a game. Challenges in games have an emphasis on perceiving suitable actions and/or performing suitable actions...

BACKGROUND TEK, ecological and economic aspects of columnar cacti were studied in the Tehuacán Valley, Mexico to design sustainable regimes of fruit harvest. We analysed the amounts of edible fruit, seeds and flowers produced per hectare of cardonal, jiotillal and tetechera forests, their economic value and actual extraction rates, hypothesizing that the economic benefits of these NTFP would po...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America P organic farming enterprises are emerging around the world in response to burgeoning consumer demand and concerns about human and environmental health (Maeder et al. 2002; Kristiansen 2006). Previously restricted to health food stores and farmers’ markets, organic food is now a mainstream commodity. In 2000, US consumers purchased ...