The problem of abandoned land from mining activities is aggravated since the coal boom. Activities of excavating coal exscind natural vegetation and deposit stone on the natural land that modified the natural land contribute to waste farmlands. This paper presents the comparableness of SVMs method to artificial neural networks in the outlier detection problem of high dimensions. Experiments per...

Abandonment of agricultural land is a global issue and a waste of resources and brings a negative impact on the local economy. It is also one of the key contributing factors in certain environmental problems, such as soil erosion and carbon sequestration. In order to address such problems related to land abandonment, their spatial distribution must first be precisely identified. Hence, this stu...

Soil aggregate stability is an important indicator for controlling soil losses and can improve soil quality, particularly in an area such as the Loess Plateau. The objective of this study was to estimate the differences in soil aggregates across six different land-use systems (grassland, apple orchard, abandoned apple orchard, cropland maize, cropland wheat, and shrub-grassland). For this purpo...

During the last century, the socio-economic conditions of European mountain areas have completely changed, particularly in locations far from industrial areas. As a consequence of the migration of workers towards densely inhabited valleys and close-to-mountains lowland areas offering better income opportunities, the population of many small mountain villages has been declining and ageing. The t...

BACKGROUND Global demand for food has led to increased land-use change, particularly in dry land ecosystems, which has caused several environmental problems due to the soil degradation. In the Cuatro Cienegas Basin (CCB), alfalfa production irrigated by flooding impacts strongly on the soil. METHODS In order to analyze the effect of such agricultural land-use change on soil nutrient dynamics ...

Colonization of abandoned lands by woody vegetation may be a great opportunity for ecosystem recovery given the current and future trend of land abandonment. This may help to reverse the generalized condition of ecosystem degradation of developed countries which is an urgent need. However, ecosystem recovery in abandoned lands can be seriously limited by biotic and abiotic factors. Indentify su...