Publications related to Agricultural land

Civil war hinders crop production and threatens food security in Syria

Assessing the impact of violent conflict on Syrian agriculture is challenging given data limitations and attributability issues. Using satellite data at 30 m spatial resolution, we found that the extent of productive cropland showed greater interannual var ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization during the last four decades in Switzerland and their impacts on urban heat islands

Martí Bosch Padrós

Urbanization is nowadays a global phenomenon which is increasingly concentrating the world's population in cities. In Switzerland, recent decades have seen an unprecedented loss of arable land due to urbanization, which has triggered amendments in the spat ...

EPFL2021

Alternative Scenarios for the Development of Oil Palm in the Tropics: Carbon and Nutrients Dynamics

Juan Carlos Quezada Rivera

Expansion of agriculture in forested areas poses significant threats and pressure to ecosystems and potentially the global climate. More specifically, expansion of oil palm (OP) plantations has been found to exert great impact on key ecosystem functions li ...

EPFL2020

Edge influence on understorey plant communities depends on forest management

Matteo Tolosano

Questions Does the influence of forest edges on plant species richness and composition depend on forest management? Do forest specialists and generalists show contrasting patterns? ...

WILEY2020

Stakeholders’ Perspectives to Support the Integration of Ecosystem Services in Spatial Planning in Switzerland

Jérôme Chenal, Rémi Jaligot

Integrating the concept of ecosystem services (ES) into spatial planning is an opportunity to make land use and management choices that maximize the delivery of multiple ES. The assessment of social demand can be useful for the identification of priority a ...

2019

Carbon neutral expansion of oil palm plantations in the Neotropics

Alexandre Buttler, Thomas Guillaume, Juan Carlos Quezada Rivera

Alternatives to ecologically devastating deforestation land use change trajectories are needed to reduce the carbon footprint of oil palm (OP) plantations in the tropics. Although various land use change options have been proposed, so far, there are no emp ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)2019

Adapting Governance Incentives to Avoid Common Pool Resource Underuse: The Case of Swiss Summer Pastures

Ivo Philippe Baur

The use of summer pastures in the European Alps provides much evidence against Hardin's prediction of the tragedy of the commons. For centuries, farmers have kept summer pastures in communal tenure and avoided its overuse with self-designed regulations. Du ...

2018

Tropical soils degraded by slash-and-burn cultivation can be recultivated when amended with ashes and compost

Alexandre Buttler, Vincent Eric Jules Jassey, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Justine Marie Gay des Combes, Muhammad Saleem Arif, Leia Soraya Véronique Falquet, Clara Sanz Carrillo

In many tropical regions, slash-and-burn agriculture is considered as a driver of deforestation; the forest is converted into agricultural land by cutting and burning the trees. However, the fields are abandoned after few years because of yield decrease an ...

Wiley2017

Slash-and-burn agriculture and tropical cyclone activity in Madagascar: Implication for soil fertility dynamics and corn performance

Alexandre Buttler, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Justine Marie Gay des Combes, Thomas Guillaume

On the western coast of Madagascar, the dry tropical forest of Kirindy may disappear in the next 50 years because of its rapid conversion into agricultural land by slash-and-burn cultivation. The slash-and-burn fields are cultivated during 3 years in avera ...

Elsevier Science Bv2017

Suppressed convective rainfall by agricultural expansion in southeastern Burkina Faso

Marc Parlange, Natalie Claire Ceperley, Gabriel George Katul, Theophile Mande, Scott W. Tyler

With the green economy being promoted as a path to sustainable development and food security within the African continent, the influx of agricultural land is proliferating at a rapid pace often replacing natural savannah forests. Where agriculture is prima ...

American Geophysical Union2015

Used planet: A global history

Jed Oliver Kaplan

Human use of land has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both humanity and the biosphere. Interdisciplinary paleoecolog ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

Life cycle environmental impacts of a prospective palm-based biorefinery in Parà State-Brazil

Edgard Gnansounou

The availability of about 18 million hectares of grassland in Para State, Brazil, and the possibility of increasing the livestock density display a good perspective for the oil palm expansion in pasture land. A life cycle assessment is performed for a pros ...

Elsevier2013

Impact of biofuels production on land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions : methodological framework and system dynamics modeling applied to soybean-based biodiesel production in Argentina

Luis Alberto Panichelli

This research assesses the effect of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission constraints imposed in biofuel importing countries on the export potential of biofuel producing countries. Several countries are promoting the introduction of biofuels on their energy matri ...

EPFL2012

RETRACTED: Cyanobacteria and microalgae: a positive prospect for biofuels

Edgard Gnansounou

Biofuel–bioenergy production has generated intensive interest due to increased concern regarding limited petroleum-based fuel supplies and their contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels. Biofuel research is not just a matter of finding the right type of biom ...

Elsevier2011

Soil-vegetation patterns in secondary slash and burn successions in Central Menabe, Madagascar

Alexandre Buttler, Jean-Michel Gobat

Slash and burn agriculture is a traditional and predominant land use practice in Madagascar and its relevance in the context of forest preservation is significant. At the end of a cycle of culture, the fields become mostly weed covered and the soil fertili ...

2010

Holocene land-cover reconstructions for studies on land cover-climate feedbacks

Jed Oliver Kaplan

The major objectives of this paper are: (1) to review the pros and cons of the scenarios of past anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) developed during the last ten years, (2) to discuss issues related to pollen-based reconstruction of the past land-cover ...

2010

The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe

Jed Oliver Kaplan, Kristen Marie Krumhardt

Humans have transformed Europe’s landscapes since the establishment of the first agricultural societies in the mid-Holocene. The most important anthropogenic alteration of the natural environment was the clearing of forests to establish cropland and pastur ...

2009

Life Cycle Assessment of Soybean-Based Biodiesel in Argentina for Export

Edgard Gnansounou, Arnaud Dauriat, Luis Alberto Panichelli

Background, aim and scope. Regional specificities are a key factor when analyzing the environmental impact of a biofuel pathway through a life cycle assessment (LCA). Due to different energy mixes, transport distances, agricultural practices and land use c ...

2009

Land use changes and transnational migration : the impact of remittances in Western Mexico

Silvia Hostettler

The present study focuses on the economic, political/institutional, technological, cultural, demographic and environmental drivers of land use change. It aims to understand the factors influencing land use decisions at the household level, in particular th ...

EPFL2007

Organic pollutants in compost and digestate. Part 1. Polychlorinated biphenyls, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and molecular markers

Joseph Tarradellas, Rahel Christine Brändli, Reinhard Furrer

In Europe, 9.3 x 10(6) t(dry weight ( dw)) of compost and digestate are produced per year. Most of this is applied to agricultural land, which can lead to considerable inputs of organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls ( PCB) and polycyclic ar ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2007