Land degradation (LD) poses a major threat to food security, livelihoods sustainability, ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. The total area of arable land in the world is estimated at 7616 million acres or only 24% of the total area of the land surface, and currently about half of this area is cultivated. The productivity of arable land depends mainly on soil formation and management. Soil contains mineral components, organic matter and microorganism in a natural dynamic balance whose components have been formed in thousands and millions of years (geologic ages). Disruption of this balance due to human pressures and poor land use leads to soil degradation in few years. Scientists differed in setting a precise definition of the concept and dimensions of land degradation, but many agreed on the general concept of land degradation: ‘quantitative or qualitative change in the properties of soil that reduces the land's potential for production’ and the more comprehensive definition that land degradation is Change in the characteristics of the Earth. Leading to the creation of more desert or drier conditions, due to the decline or deterioration of the load of biological energy for a period of time does not have to be continuous, but temporary. Additionally, organic farming might be a substitute to prevent the deterioration of our soil. The emphasis of the current review is on how land degradation affects agriculture and the environment, as well as how we can manage our lands to prevent further degradation. Therefore, this review will focus in explain the land degradation definition and concept, and presenting two case studies from Egypt and India.
Global change drivers are known to interact in their effects on biodiversity, but much research to date ignores this complexity. As a consequence, there are problems in the attribution of biodiversity change to different drivers and, therefore, our ability to manage habitats and landscapes appropriately. Few studies explicitly acknowledge and account for interactive (i.e., nonadditive) effects of land use and climate change on biodiversity. One reason is that the mechanisms by which drivers interact are poorly understood. We evaluate such mechanisms, including interactions between demographic parameters, evolutionary trade‐offs and synergies and threshold effects of population size and patch occupancy on population persistence. Other reasons for the lack of appropriate research are limited data availability and analytical issues in addressing interaction effects. We highlight the influence that attribution errors can have on biodiversity projections and discuss experimental designs and analytical tools suited to this challenge. Finally, we summarize the risks and opportunities provided by the existence of interaction effects. Risks include ineffective conservation management; but opportunities also arise, whereby the negative impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be reduced through appropriate land management as an adaptation measure. We hope that increasing the understanding of key mechanisms underlying interaction effects and discussing appropriate experimental and analytical designs for attribution will help researchers, policy makers, and conservation practitioners to better minimize risks and exploit opportunities provided by land use‐climate change interactions.
Amanuel Kumsa Bojer, Muluneh Woldetsadik Abshare, Fitsum Mesfin
et al.
Abstract Climate and land use changes are critical factors affecting watershed water yields, with significant implications for water resources at both local and regional levels. This study examined the combined effects of temporal and spatial climate variability and land use/land cover (LULC) changes on surface water yield and availability in the Gilgel Gibe watershed, Ethiopia, from 1993 to 2023. Utilizing the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) hydrological models, machine learning, and remote sensing techniques, this study assessed variations in water resources and their impacts on basin water yield. This study utilized Landsat (30 m), MODIS (500 m–1 km), and 4 km resolution climate datasets from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA POWER for large-scale climate and land-use analyses from 1993 to 2023. An ensemble of machine learning models, including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and XGBoost (XGB), were used to evaluate the effects of climate variability and land use on annual water yield. The study revealed significant land cover changes over a 30-year period. Shrubland decreased from 1,108.37 km2 (21.54%) in 1993 to 295.22 km2 (5.74%) in 2023. Grasslands and wetlands also showed declining trends. In contrast, water bodies increased from 12.51 km2 (0.24%) to 41.57 km2 (0.81%), primarily due to the construction of the Gilgel Gibe hydroelectric dam, and forested areas slightly decreased from 626.73 km2 (12.18%) to 534.18 km2 (10.38%). The surface runoff decreased to 15.78% in 2021 and 15.28% in 2022, whereas the water yield dropped from 1.22% in 1993 to 0.83% by 2023. This study also showed a reduction in lateral flow and higher evapotranspiration levels in 2000 and 2017. The decrease in runoff can be attributed to the loss of wetlands and grasslands, reduced precipitation, and regulatory effects of hydropower operations. In contrast, elevated evapotranspiration levels were primarily attributed to temperature extremes, vegetation stress, and potential increases in irrigation practices. These findings underscore the importance of climatic elements in regulating river discharge and the necessity for smart land use planning to prevent negative environmental consequences on water resources.
In environmental management, monitoring transitions toward regenerative agriculture (RA) supports carbon offset initiatives aligned with Regulation (EU) 2018/841. Current Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) platforms primarily analyze macro-scale Earth Observation (EO) vegetation trends, yet are increasingly enhancing ground-based data collection. This study integrates these approaches through a methodological workflow comprising: (1) a survey segment with a 30 × 30 m pixel sampling grid for landscape-scale trend assessment and sub-hectare Survey Validation Areas delineating specific RA management practices; and (2) an EO monitoring segment using Landsat 5, 7, and 8 time series, processed in R and Google Earth Engine (GEE) to model 30 m phenological dynamics, alongside 10 m Sentinel-2 NDVI 15-day Maximum Value Composites published via a GEE application (RegenAPP). Applied to an experimental RA site, La Junquera – Camp Altiplano (Murcia, Spain), the workflow enabled fine-scale analyses, identifying greening trends in no-till RA plots in contrast to browning in adjacent tilled organic fields. Sub-hectare analyses further detailed phenological patterns linked to specific RA practices. This integrated EO–Survey approach complements LULUCF assessments by coupling EO-derived vegetation analytics with targeted field validation, capturing spatial and temporal RA transition dynamics.
Vívian Terra de Azevedo Decúpero, Caroline Damascena Cardoso, Sarah Santos Gomes
et al.
Introdução: As universidades públicas desempenham um papel fundamental na produção de conhecimento científico, e por meio da extensão universitária, conectam ensino e pesquisa às necessidades sociais. Nesse contexto, o curso de Farmácia do CCENS-UFES, em parceria com a escola EEEFM Sirena Rezende Fonseca, localizada no distrito de Celina (Alegre-ES), desenvolveu, com o apoio da FAPES, um projeto voltado para a capacitação e conscientização dos alunos do ensino médio sobre Infecções Sexualmente Transmissíveis (IST). A metodologia adotada integrou abordagens teóricas e práticas, com foco em ensaios imunodiagnósticos, permitindo aos estudantes uma aplicação real dos conhecimentos adquiridos. Um dos casos abordados durante o projeto envolveu a história fictícia de Gabriel, aluno do programa de iniciação científica Jr. Gabriel, ao aprender sobre as IST, foi capaz de reconhecer os sinais de uma possível infecção em seu irmão Henrique, que trabalha na roça. Henrique, ao notar uma lesão genital, procurou Gabriel em busca de ajuda. A partir do aprendizado sobre as IST, Gabriel suspeitou da infecção e sugeriu que seu irmão realizasse a bateria de testes rápidos no Centro de Testagem e Aconselhamento de Alegre. O resultado positivo para sífilis evidenciou como a disseminação do conhecimento no âmbito escolar pode ter um impacto direto na saúde e bem-estar da comunidade. Além dessa aplicação prática, observou-se que, ao longo da experiência, muitos alunos demonstraram desconhecimento sobre IST, incluindo sinais, sintomas, modos de transmissão e formas de tratamento. No entanto, houve grande receptividade ao aprendizado, refletida na participação ativa nas atividades laboratoriais e discussões. A evolução na compreensão e na aplicação dos conceitos foi uma das conquistas mais significativas do projeto. Apesar do entusiasmo gerado nas atividades práticas, um dos desafios foi manter o interesse dos alunos durante as exposições teóricas. Para lidar com isso, foram inseridos casos cotidianos, como o mencionado acima, estruturados com narrativas interativas, nas quais os alunos contribuíam com suas próprias soluções para as situações apresentadas. Essa abordagem contribuiu para uma maior imersão no tema e facilitou a assimilação do conteúdo. O alcance do projeto foi limitado pelo número reduzido de alunos atendidos, o que comprometeu sua abrangência. Diante dos resultados, é clara a necessidade de investimentos públicos para ampliar iniciativas como o PICJr, possibilitando a inclusão de mais estudantes e a exploração de outras questões de saúde. A integração entre escolas, universidades e serviços de saúde é fundamental para fortalecer a educação em saúde e incentivar o ingresso no ensino superior, promovendo impactos positivos na formação dos alunos e na comunidade.
Pharmacy and materia medica, Pharmaceutical industry
Recent advances in remote sensing technology have made submeter resolution imagery increasingly accessible, offering remarkable detail for fine-grained land cover analysis. However, its full potential remains underutilized - particularly for large-scale land cover mapping - due to the lack of sufficient, high-quality annotated datasets. Existing labels are typically derived from pre-existing products or manual annotation, which are often unreliable or prohibitively expensive, particularly given the rich visual detail and massive data volumes of submeter imagery. Inspired by the spatial autocorrelation principle, which suggests that objects of the same class tend to co-occur with similar visual features in local neighborhoods, we propose the Mask Clustering-based Annotation Engine (MCAE), which treats semantically consistent mask groups as the minimal annotating units to enable efficient, simultaneous annotation of multiple instances. It significantly improves annotation efficiency by one to two orders of magnitude, while preserving label quality, semantic diversity, and spatial representativeness. With MCAE, we build a high-quality annotated dataset of about 14 billion labeled pixels, referred to as HiCity-LC, which supports the generation of city-scale land cover maps across five major Chinese cities with classification accuracies above 85%. It is the first publicly available submeter resolution city-level land cover benchmark, highlighting the scalability and practical utility of MCAE for large-scale, submeter resolution mapping. The dataset is available at https://github.com/chenhaocs/MCAE
Our knowledge about land-use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is mostly limited to single trophic levels, leaving us uncertain about whole-community biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. We analyse consequences of the globally important land-use transformation from tropical forests to oil palm plantations. Species diversity, density and biomass of invertebrate communities suffer at least 45% decreases from rainforest to oil palm. Combining metabolic and food-web theory, we calculate annual energy fluxes to model impacts of land-use intensification on multitrophic ecosystem functioning. We demonstrate a 51% reduction in energy fluxes from forest to oil palm communities. Species loss clearly explains variation in energy fluxes; however, this relationship depends on land-use systems and functional feeding guilds, whereby predators are the most heavily affected. Biodiversity decline from forest to oil palm is thus accompanied by even stronger reductions in functionality, threatening to severely limit the functional resilience of communities to cope with future global changes. Transformation of natural ecosystems into agricultural land is usually accompanied by extensive biodiversity loss. Calculating multitrophic energy fluxes, Barnes et al.report severe reductions of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning from tropical rainforest to oil-palm plantations.
Abstract Background Photodegradation of plant litter plays a pivotal role in the global carbon (C) cycle. In temperate forest ecosystems, the exposure of plant litter to solar radiation can be significantly altered by changes in autumn phenology and snow cover due to climatic change. How this will affect litter decomposition and nutrient dynamic interacting with forest canopy structure (understorey vs. gaps) is uncertain. In the present study, we conducted a field experiment using leaf litter of early-fall deciduous Betula platyphylla (Asian white birch) and late-fall deciduous Quercus mongolica (Mongolian oak) to explore the effect of change in autumn solar radiation on dynamics of litter decomposition in a gap and understorey of a temperate mixed forest. Results Exposure to the full-spectrum of not only significantly increased the loss of mass, C, and lignin, but also modified N loss through both immobilization and mineralization during the initial decomposition during autumn canopy opening, irrespective of canopy structure and litter species. These effects were mainly driven by the blue-green spectral region of sunlight. Short-term photodegradation by autumn solar radiation had a positive legacy effect on the later decomposition particularly in the forest gap, increasing mass loss by 16% and 19% for Asian white birch and Mongolia oak, respectively. Conclusions Our results suggest that earlier autumn leaf-fall phenology and/or later snow cover due to land-use or climate change would increase the exposure of plant organic matter to solar radiation, and accelerate ecosystem processes, C and nutrient cycling in temperate forest ecosystems. The study provides a reference for predictive research on carbon cycling under the background of global climate change.