Publications related to Arable land

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

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

New perspectives for spatial planning in Switzerland: the role of ecosystem services

Rémi Jaligot

Spatial planning deals with the spatial expression of human activities in an integrated way to minimize their negative impacts on the natural and land systems. Rapid land use and land cover changes are important drivers of change of the benefits people der ...

EPFL2020

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

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

Pilot studies on optimizing land use, building density and solar electricity generation in dense urban settings

François Maréchal, Shanshan Hsieh, Arno Schlueter

Previous studies have identified links between the urban form and the performance of urban energy systems. Land use and density are two important aspects of urban planning and design. This paper studies the relationship between these aspects and the perfor ...

UNIV POLITECNICA VALENCIA2018

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

Linking historical land use to present vegetation and soil characteristics under slash-and-burn cultivation in Madagascar

Alexandre Buttler, Rodolphe Schlaepfer, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Andry Randriamikatra Randrianarison

Aim: In this paper, we link historical land use of cultivated parcels formerly slashed and burnt, with current secondary vegetation and soil characteristics, in the region of evergreen rain forest in Madagascar. Aim is to understand the legacy effect of fo ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

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

Transplantation of subalpine wood-pasture turfs along a natural climatic gradient reveals lower resistance of unwooded pastures to climate change compared to wooded ones

Alexandre Buttler, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov, Thomas Spiegelberger

Climate change could impact strongly on cold-adapted mountain ecosystems, but little is known about its interaction with traditional land-use practices. We used an altitudinal gradient to simulate a year-round warmer and drier climate for semi-natural suba ...

Springer2014

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

Experimental study of the impact of large-scale wind farms on land-atmosphere exchanges

Fernando Porté Agel, Corey Dean Markfort, Wei Zhang

Large-scale wind farms, covering a significant portion of the land and ocean surface, may affect the transport of momentum, heat, mass and moisture between the atmosphere and the land locally and globally. To understand the wind-farm-atmosphere interaction ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2013

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

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

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

TASC-eine PC-Anwendung zur Vorbeugung von Schadverdichtungen

Gilbert Steinmann, Etienne Diserens

TASC (TYRES/TRACKS AND SOIL COMPACTION) is an Excel tool designed foremost as an aid in arable farming. The vulnerability of the soil to the passage of wheels or tracks is assessed after considering soil and load property factors. Danger of soil compaction ...

2005