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Hydrological Response to Agricultural Land Use Heterogeneity Using Variable Infiltration Capacity Model
Hydrological responses corresponding to the agricultural land use alterations are critical for planning crop management strategies, water resources management, and environmental evaluations. However, accurate estimation and evaluation of these hydrological responses are restricted by the limited availability of detailed crop classification in land use and land cover. An innovative approach using state-of-the-art Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model is utilized by setting up the crop-specific vegetation parameterization and analyse the effect of uniform and heterogeneous agricultural land use over the hydrological responses of the basin, in the Kangsabati River Basin (KRB). Thirteen year simulations (1998–2010) based on two different scenarios i.e., single-crop in agricultural land use (SC-ALU) and multi-crop in agricultural land use (MC-ALU) patterns are incorporated in the model and calibrated (1998–2006) and validated (2007–2010) for the streamflow at Reservoir and Mohanpur in the KRB. The results demonstrated that the VIC model improved the estimates of hydrological components, especially surface runoff and evapotranspiration (ET) at daily and monthly timescales corresponding to MC-ALU than SC-ALU (NSC > 0.7). Grid-scale ET estimates are improved after incorporating heterogeneous agricultural land use (NSC > 0.55 and R2 > 0.55) throughout the period of 1998–2010. This study improves our understanding on how the change in agricultural land use in the model settings alters the basin hydrological characteristics, and to provide model-based approaches for best management practices in irrigation scheduling, crop water requirement, and management strategies in the absence of flux towers, eddy covariance, and lysimeters in the basin.
Journal Article
Farmland preservation : land for future generations
\"As land is lost to urban sprawl and other non-farm activity, our ability to produce food is diminished and options for future food production are limited. Farmland preservation speaks to the need to preserve the agricultural land base for future generations. The need for protection is driven by uncertainty caused by climate change, population growth, food security, energy availability, and other local and global factors. This uncertainty means that there is an ever-growing responsibility to ensure that the actions of today do not compromise the needs of future generations. This second edition of \"Farmland Preservation\" provides a range of views and case studies from across Canada, the United States, and beyond. Its fourteen essays are intended to help the reader understand the importance of the issue and the potential for applying new approaches to agricultural protection, policy tools, and initiatives.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Field sizes and the future of farmland biodiversity in European landscapes
Lower diversity of plant and animal farmland species are usually reported where cropland has been aggregated into larger fields, which raises prospects of curbing declines in European farmland biodiversity and associated ecosystem services by halting trends to field size increases associated to agricultural intensification, without having to set aside arable land for conservation. Here, we consider the factors underlying trade‐offs between farmer income and biodiversity as mediated by field size at local and landscape scales, and how these trade‐offs may be overcome. Field sizes are still increasing, facilitated by increasing farm sizes and land consolidation. Decreases in working time and fuel expenses when fields are larger, uptake of larger machinery and subsidies favoring larger farms provide incentives to manage land in larger units, putting farmland biodiversity further at risk. Yet, field size‐mediated ecological–economic trade‐offs are largely ignored in policy and research. We recommend internalizing the ecological effects of changes in landscape‐scale field size into land consolidation scheme design, ensuring that EU Common Agricultural Policy post‐2020 rewards farmers that maintain and recreate fine‐grained landscapes where these are essential for farmland biodiversity targets, and reducing economic–ecological trade‐offs by stimulating agricultural research and innovation for economically efficient yet biodiversity‐friendly farming in fine‐grained landscapes.
Journal Article
Delinking Land Rights from Land Use: Certification and Migration in Mexico
In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, we find that households obtaining certificates were subsequently 28 percent more likely to have a migrant member. We also show that even though land certification induced migration, it had little effect on cultivated area due to consolidation of farm units.
Journal Article
Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity
A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and the services that they provide us while enhancing food production. This challenge for developing countries confronts the force of economic globalization, which seeks cropland that is shrinking in availability and triggers deforestation. Four mechanisms--the displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects--that are amplified by economic globalization accelerate land conversion. A few developing countries have managed a land use transition over the recent decades that simultaneously increased their forest cover and agricultural production. These countries have relied on various mixes of agricultural intensification, land use zoning, forest protection, increased reliance on imported food and wood products, the creation of off-farm jobs, foreign capital investments, and remittances. Sound policies and innovations can therefore reconcile forest preservation with food production. Globalization can be harnessed to increase land use efficiency rather than leading to uncontrolled land use expansion. To do so, land systems should be understood and modeled as open systems with large flows of goods, people, and capital that connect local land use with global-scale factors.
Journal Article
Dealing with peace : the Guatemalan campesino movement and the post-conflict neoliberal state
\"Dealing with Peace presents the struggles of the Guatemalan campesino (peasant) social movement during the country's post-conflict transition from 1996 to the present, focusing on efforts to obtain land and improve livelihoods within a shifting, yet consistently hostile, political-economic environment. With special focus on the relationship between the movement and the neoliberal state, Simon Granovsky-Larsen asks whether the acceptance of neoliberal resources - in this case, support for land access in Guatemala provided by the World Bank-funded Fondo de Tierras - reduces the potential for social movements to continue to work for transformative change. Positioned in contrast to studies warning that social movements cannot maintain their original vision after accepting such support, this book argues that organizations within the Guatemalan campesino movement have engaged strategically with neoliberalism, utilizing available resources to advance visions of social change. Using a wealth of primary data collected over more than a year of fieldwork, it contributes significantly to the study of Guatemalan politics and advances understandings of the grounded operation of neoliberalism. Exploring both the dynamics of a national neoliberal transition and the ways in which these play out within civil society, Dealing with Peace reveals the long-term and often contradictory negotiation of political and economic transitions.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000
To map and characterize anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere before and during the Industrial Revolution, from 1700 to 2000. Global. Anthropogenic biomes (anthromes) were mapped for 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000 using a rule-based anthrome classification model applied to gridded global data for human population density and land use. Anthropogenic transformation of terrestrial biomes was then characterized by map comparisons at century intervals. In 1700, nearly half of the terrestrial biosphere was wild, without human settlements or substantial land use. Most of the remainder was in a seminatural state (45%) having only minor use for agriculture and settlements. By 2000, the opposite was true, with the majority of the biosphere in agricultural and settled anthromes, less than 20% seminatural and only a quarter left wild. Anthropogenic transformation of the biosphere during the Industrial Revolution resulted about equally from land-use expansion into wildlands and intensification of land use within seminatural anthromes. Transformation pathways differed strongly between biomes and regions, with some remaining mostly wild but with the majority almost completely transformed into rangelands, croplands and villages. In the process of transforming almost 39% of earth's total ice-free surface into agricultural land and settlements, an additional 37% of global land without such use has become embedded within agricultural and settled anthromes. Between 1700 and 2000, the terrestrial biosphere made the critical transition from mostly wild to mostly anthropogenic, passing the 50% mark early in the 20th century. At present, and ever more in the future, the form and process of terrestrial ecosystems in most biomes will be predominantly anthropogenic, the product of land use and other direct human interactions with ecosystems. Ecological research and conservation efforts in all but a few biomes would benefit from a primary focus on the novel remnant, recovering and managed ecosystems embedded within used lands.
Journal Article