Climate change and associated sea level rise (SLR) are already impacting low-lying coastal areas, including islands, throughout the world. Many of these areas are inhabited, many will need to be abandoned in coming decades as SLR continues. We examine the evolution (1850-2013) of the last inhabited offshore island in Virginia waters of Chesapeake Bay USA, the Tangier Islands. Three SLR scenario...

Activities of excavating coal exscind natural vegetation and deposit stone on the natural land that modified the natural land contribute to waste farmlands. Additionally, pollution of environment, losses of human life, human settlements and the infrastructure are also rising, which certainly demands urgent attention. Revegetation had been considered as a kind of cost-effective means. A reasonab...

The process of secondary succession on degraded lands in the Amazon depends on their land-use histories. In this scenario, little is known about how animal communities respond to different types of secondary vegetation in the region. We examined the effects of abandoned cattle pasture, Vismiaand Cecropia-dominated regrowth on the abundance of bat species and community composition in the Central...

Human land use legacies have significant and long-lasting ecological impacts across landscapes. Investigating ancient (>400 years) legacy effects can be problematic due to the difficulty in detecting specific, historic land uses, especially those hidden beneath dense canopies. Caracol, the largest (~200 km2) Maya archaeological site in Belize, was abandoned ca. A.D. 900, leaving behind myriad s...

Agricultural practices have proven to be unsuitable in many cases, causing considerable reductions in soil quality. Land management practices can provide solutions to this problem and contribute to get a sustainable agriculture model. The main objective of this work was to assess the effect of different agricultural management practices on soil microbial community structure (evaluated as abunda...

This study examines the effects of land use and slope angle on runoff, soil loss and nitrogen loss from hillslopes of the Loess Plateau in China. Farmland, wasteland and four forest treatments (sea buckthornþ poplar, immature sea buckthorn, mature sea buckthorn, and immature Chinese pine) were the types of land use that were compared. The results showed that July was the critical period for run...