We assessed a donor-funded grassland management project designed to create both conservation and livelihood benefits in the rangelands of Mongolia's Gobi desert. The project ran from 1995 to 2006, and we used remote sensing Normalized Differential Vegetation Index data from 1982 to 2009 to compare project grazing sites to matched control sites before and after the project's implementation.

The omnipresent existence of human-nature relationship all over India has been grossly neglected as a tool for conservation management. The sacred groves, patches of forests conserved due to associated religious faith have been described by foresters, travelers, anthropologists, ecologists for more than two hundred years from different parts of the country. The sacred grove institution in the Western Ghats of India which has been nurtured by the local communities has been serving as ecological refugia for a range of species and habitat of the Western Ghats.

How is the biodiversity within an ecosystem related to the ecosystem's function? Quantifying and understanding this relationship—the biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) —is important because socio-economic development is almost always accompanied by the loss of natural habitat and species. Short-term economic gains may thus trump longer-term benefits for human society, creating vulnerabilities that could be avoided or corrected with enough knowledge about the role of biodiversity.

Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richness and abiotic factors to multifunctionality in drylands, which collectively cover 41% of Earth’s land surface and support over 38% of the human population.

Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is situated in the Southeast of Bangladesh covering about 10 per cent of the total land. It is the native hoe of 13 tribal communities and these communities have their own traditional knowledge for natural resource managements. This paper provides 8 traditional knowledge namely, folk classification of landform, land use zoning, community reserve for common resource management, fuel wood selection for domestic use, water harvesting ditches, tree management in the jhum field by the Murang community, coppice management of Gmelina arborea Roxb.

The present study comprises of field trips in different rural localities of Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts of Kerala. Information regarding the occurrence of plant species, their local names, parts ued, formulations and vegetable preparations through interviews and discussions held with elderly persons of rural communities were recorded. The plant specimens were identified and herbarium sheets prepared for all the species. From the information documented and also from literature data, 9 vegetable plants having high nutrient value were selected.