Academic literature on the topic 'Land management practices'

Desertification is a form of land degradation principally in semi-arid and arid areas influenced by climatic and human factors. As a country plagued by extensive sandy desertification and frequent sandstorms and dust storms, China has been trying to find ways to achieve the sustainable management of desertified lands. This paper reviewed the impact of climate change and anthropogenic activities on desertified areas, and the effort, outcome, and lessons learned from desertification control in China. Although drying and warming trends and growing population pressures exist in those areas, the expanding trend of desertified land achieved an overall reversal. In the past six decades, many efforts, including government policies, forestry, and desertification control programs, combined with eco-industrialization development, have been integrated to control the desertification in northern China. Positive human intervention including afforestation, and the rehabilitation of mobile sandy land, and water conservation have facilitated the return of arid and semi-arid ecosystems to a more balanced state. China’s practices in desertification control could provide valuable knowledge for sustainable desertified land management on a global scale.

In Ethiopia, the practice of land management started three decades ago in order to address the problem of land degradation and to further boost agricultural production. However, the impact of land management practices in curbing land degradation problems and improving the productivity of the agricultural sector is insignificant. Various empirical works have previously identified the determinants of the adoption rate of land management practices. However, the sustainability of land management practices after adoption, and the various factors that control the sustainability of implemented land management practices, are not well addressed. This study analyzed the factors affecting the sustainability of land management practices after implementation in Mecha Woreda, northwestern Ethiopia. The study used 378 sample respondents, selected by a systematic random sampling technique. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the quantitative data, while the qualitative data were qualitatively and concurrently analyzed with the quantitative data. The sustained supply of fodder from the implemented land management practices, as well as improved cattle breed, increases the sustainability of the implemented land management practices. While lack of agreement in the community, lack of enforcing community bylaws, open cattle grazing, lack of benefits of implemented land management practices, acting as barrier for farming practices, poor participation of household heads during planning and decision-making processes, as well as the lack of short-term benefits, reduce the sustainability of the implemented land management practices. Thus, it is better to allow for the full participation of household heads in planning and decision-making processes to bring practical and visible results in land management practices. In addition, recognizing short-term benefits to compensate the land lost in constructing land management structures must be the strategy in land management practices. Finally, reducing the number of cattle and practicing stall feeding is helpful both for the sustainability of land management practices and the productivity of cattle. In line with this, fast-growing fodder grass species have to be introduced for household heads to grow on land management structures and communal grazing fields for stall feeding.

Long-term agricultural practices have been shown to affect soil hydro-physical properties in multiple ways. They affect the stability and distribution of soil aggregates leading to changes in water retention, bulk density, hydraulic conductivity, and porosity. Aggregate stability is an indicator of the resilience of aggregates to external forces. Unstable aggregates can change rapidly under different land management practices and meteorological conditions. Μacro-aggregates (>250 μm) are formed more rapidly and are often more sensitive to management changes. Here, four different long-term experiments, run by the SoilCare Horizon 2020 Project partners, were sampled and analyzed, in order to evaluate the impact of different agricultural management practices in the water stability of soil aggregates and the fractions distribution. Different experiments selected, include control-conventional treatment and different treatments, which are considered soil improving. The treatments are about soil cultivation (conventional ploughing-control, zero tillage, minimum tillage, strip tillage, shallow tillage) and organic input (mineral fertilization-control, residue incorporation, farmyard manure) and are selected in areas with different climatic and soil conditions. Initial results indicate that treatments with less soil disturbance present more water stable aggregates (WSA) >250 μm and higher mean weight diameters (MWD), as well as the same trend following the treatments with increased organic input. According to Tukey’s Honest Significance test (p < 0.05), management practices are shown to have a significant impact on the WSA and MWD in most cases, but not all similar treatments in the different areas present the same results. The large macro-aggregates (>2 mm) seem to be greatly sensitive to soil cultivation, whereas the results for the small macro-aggregates (250 μm–2 mm) are controversial among the different tillage experiments. The different organic inputs seems to affect more the small macro-aggregates than the larger. The initial results indicate that the shifts in the soil structure cannot only be justified by the different management practices. The interrelationships and potential links with other soil properties like texture, bulk density, particulate organic matter and climate will be taken into account in further steps in order to understand the mechanisms behind the aggregation shifts.

Agricultural soils in the tropics have undergone significant declines in their native carbon stock through the long-term use of extractive farming practices. However, these soils have significant capacity to sequester CO2through the implementation of improved land management practices. This paper reviews the published and grey literature related to the influence of improved land management practices on soil carbon stock in the tropics. The review suggests that the implementation of improved land management practices such as crop rotation, no-till, cover crops, mulches, compost, or manure can be effective in enhancing soil organic carbon pool and agricultural productivity in the tropics. The benefits of such amendments were, however, often short-lived, and the added organic matters were usually mineralized to CO2within a few cropping seasons leading to large-scale leakage. We found that management of black carbon (C), increasingly referred to as biochar, may overcome some of those limitations and provide an additional soil management option. Under present circumstances, recommended crop and land management practices are inappropriate for the vast majority of resource constrained smallholder farmers and farming systems. We argue that expanding the use of biochar in agricultural lands would be important for sequestering atmospheric CO2and mitigating climate change, while implementing the recommended crop and land management practices in selected areas where the smallholder farmers are not resource constrained.