The increasing pressure on the earth’s resources due to population growth requires that development and resource use be managed to maintain a sustainable environment so as to preserve or enhance human well-being. A practical approach for demonstrating the environmental sustainability of an...

This paper argues that a sustainable ecosystem management approach is vital to ensure the delivery of essential ‘life support’ ecosystem services and must be mainstreamed into societal conscience, political thinking and economic processes. Feeding the world at a time of climate change,...

In the past decade, many European farmers have adopted less-intensive production methods replacing external inputs with local resources and farmers’ skills. Some have developed closer relations with consumers, also known as short food-supply chains or agro-food relocalization. Through both...

The aim of this study is to determine the impact potential of land use on biotic production and climate regulation in the agricultural phase of a product, taking into account the varied soil and crop management. Land occupation and transformation impacts of soybean production in Argentina for...

Tree planting is widely advocated and applied in urban areas, with large-scale projects underway in cities globally. Numerous potential benefits are used to justify these planting campaigns. However, reports of poor tree survival raise questions about the ability of such projects to deliver on...

Valuing ecosystem services with microeconomic underpinnings presents challenges because these services typically constitute nonmarket values and contribute to human welfare indirectly through a series of ecological pathways that are dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to quantify and link to...

This paper discusses the construction of an ecosystem services index (ESI) and the respective roles of ecology and economics in that effort. It extends the concept of an ESI, analogous to Gross Domestic Product, to other analogous indices, including an ecosystem price or value index, and a net...

Urban environments are in continual transition. Yet, as many cities continue to grow and develop in ways deemed typical or standard, these transitions can be difficult to acknowledge. Narratives of continued growth and permanence become accepted and expected while the understanding of urban...

Urban agriculture offers an alternative land use for integrating multiple functions in densely populated areas. While urban agriculture has historically been an important element of cities in many developing countries, recent concerns about economic and food security have resulted in a growing...

Using respective strengths of the biological, physical, and social sciences, we are developing an online decision support tool, the Santa Cruz Watershed Ecosystem Portfolio Model (SCWEPM), to help promote the use of information relevant to water allocation and land management in a binational...