Understanding the historical change of agricultural landscape patterns is the basis for promoting the sustainable development of cultivated land, as well as appropriate decision-making. In order to analyze spatio-temporal changes of cultivated land in Sanjiang Plain, from 1985–2015, Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) were used to reconstruct satellite data of land us...

The chernozem has high productivity, most of which is located in Northeast of China. Considering the restrictions of land use and terrain and meteorological conditions, soil erosion and degradation often result in lower agricultural output than expected. Land consolidation is served to consolidate parcels and to enlarge holdings as well as included provisions such as irrigation, drainage infras...

While we know that deforestation in the tropics is increasingly driven by commercial agriculture, most tropical countries still lack recent and spatially-explicit assessments of the relative importance of pasture and cropland expansion in causing forest loss. Here we present a spatially explicit quantification of the extent to which cultivated land and grassland expanded at the expense of fores...

Aflatoxins are cancer-causing, immuno-suppressive mycotoxins that frequently contaminate important staples in Zambia including maize and groundnut. Several species within Aspergillus section Flavi have been implicated as causal agents of aflatoxin contamination in Africa. However, Aspergillus populations associated with aflatoxin contamination in Zambia have not been adequately detailed. Most o...

Socioeconomic factors are extrinsic factors that drive spatial variability. They play an important role in land resource systems and sometimes are more important than that of the natural setting. The study aims to build a comprehensive framework for assessing unconsolidated cultivated land (UCL) in the south-central and southwestern portions of Hubei Province, China, which have not experienced ...

Managing the rapidly changing saline-alkali land under cultivation in the coastal areas of China is important not only for mitigating the negative impacts of such land on the environment, but also for ensuring long-term sustainability of agriculture. In this light, setting up rapid monitoring systems to assist decision-making in developing sustainable management plans is therefore an absolute n...

By using the GIS technologies, we interpolate the site-based meteorological data into climatic surface data, which are the main input parameters for the CropWat model, used to estimate the reference evapotranspiration (ET0). And then by combining the ET0 with the information on share of cultivated land decoded from the Landsat TM/ETM digital imagines covering the entire case study area, the Hua...

Question: Are contemporary herb and tree patterns explained by historic land use practices? If so, are observed vegetation patterns associated with lifehistory characteristics, soil properties, or other environmental variables? Location: Southeastern Ohio, USA. Methods: Using archival records, currently forested sites were identified with distinct land use histories: cultivated, pasture (but no...