Fossil fuel combustion and fertilizer application in the United States have substantially altered the nitrogen cycle, with serious effects on climate change. The climate effects can be short-lived, by impacting the chemistry of the atmosphere, or long-lived, by altering ecosystem greenhouse gas fluxes. Here we develop a coherent framework for assessing the climate change impacts of US reactive nitrogen emissions, including oxides of nitrogen, ammonia, and nitrous oxide (N2O).

The potential of grazing lands to sequester carbon must be understood to develop effective soil conservation measures and sustain livestock production.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest among three major carbon pools of global ecosystems. During the past few years, global warming and forcible land-use changes have resulted in a huge loss of this major carbon pool and as a consequence, concentration of atmospheric CO2 has increased. To mitigate the potential risks arising from atmospheric abundance of CO2, adoption of carbon sequestration strategies at different landscape scales is a major option. For this

Industrial agricultural plantations are a rapidly increasing yet largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover change. Here, we evaluate impacts of oil palm plantation development on land cover, carbon flux, and agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. With a spatially explicit land change/carbon bookkeeping model, parameterized using high-resolution satellite time series and informed by socioeconomic surveys, we assess previous and project future plantation expansion under five scenarios.

In the developing world climate change has far more ramifications than can be addressed by controlling just carbon
emissions. The developed world has stable populations and landscapes, and is thus affected mainly by the air which
spreads democratically without boundaries. On the other hand, the developing world with increasing populations and
consumption is depleting its living natural resource base of water, forest, soils and agriculture, and is poised for a far

Biomass burning is an essential part of slash-and-burn (S&B) agriculture, which is widely practiced as an important food production system in the tropical mountains of southeast Asia.S&B agriculture used to be sustainable and carbon neutral; CO2 emissions by biomass burning were balanced with photosynthetic biomass growth and land use was stable.

We quantified the wholesale transformation of the boreal landscape by open-pit oil sands mining in Alberta, Canada to evaluate its effect on carbon storage and sequestration. Contrary to claims made in the media, peatland destroyed by open-pit mining will not be restored. Current plans dictate its replacement with upland forest and tailings storage lakes, amounting to the destruction of over 29,500 ha of peatland habitat.