Agriculture must find new ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency to meet the rising demand for products, avoiding waste due to potential food scarcity. Through the systematic literature review methodology, this study analyzes and synthesizes th...
3 April 2019
Being subject to climate change and human intervention, the land-use pattern in the agro-pastoral ecotone of Northern China has undergone complex changes over the past few decades, which may jeopardize the provision of ecosystem services. Thus, for s...
The agro-pastoral ecotone serves as an important ecological transition zone between grassland and cropland. It plays a crucial role in providing forage and maintaining the ecological security of Northern China. China has initiated many ecological res...
In the Tibetan agro-pastoral ecotone, which has an altitude of 4000 m above sea level, small-scale cropland tillage has been exploited on the grassland surrounding the houses of farmers and herdsmen. However, knowledge of the effects of land change f...
Revealing the level of cultivated land use efficiency and its influencing factors in the northern agro-pastoral ecotone from the perspective of population contraction can provide a decision-making reference for ensuring national food security and pro...
The long-standing separation of agro-pastoral relations has adversely affected the agricultural economy and ecology, hindering sustainable agricultural development. The process of reconstructing agro-pastoral relations involves moving from separation...
The agro-pastoral transitional zone in northern China is an important agricultural and pastoral production base. This study focuses on the eastern section of the agro-pastoral transitional zone in northern China. Combined with spatio-temporal analysi...
Rural settlements in agro-pastoral ecotones reflect the complex interplay between natural constraints and human land use, particularly in ecologically sensitive and climatically transitional regions. This study investigated the agro-pastoral ecotone...
Under the global goals of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, China’s northern agro-pastoral ecotone—an ecologically fragile transition zone with drastic land use/cover change (LUCC)—is characterized by a lack of in-depth understa...
Agro-pastoral ecotone is an important livestock production area in the north of China, and alfalfa is the main pasture crop in this area. Aiming to address the issues of groundwater overexploitation in the area with water demand, we assessed the cons...
The agro-pastoral ecotone in northern China is the main production area of agriculture and animal husbandry, in which agricultural development relies entirely on groundwater. Due to the increasing water consumption of groundwater year by year, ground...
Fallowing is a widely adopted approach for land restoration and ecological protection in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China. However, research on the ecological impacts of fallowing in this ecologically fragile region is still limited. With...
Film mulching drip irrigation (FMDI) has shown strong yield-promoting effects in arid regions, but its regulatory effects on sorghum, under the unstable soil hydrothermal conditions of the agro-pastoral ecotone zone, remain poorly understood. Sorghum...
In agro-pastoral transitional zones, monitoring vegetation fraction coverage (FVC) and understanding its relationship with land use and climate change are crucial for comprehending how complex land-use/land-cover change (LUCC) improves ecological res...
As global climate change intensifies and economic transformation progresses, the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China faces dual challenges of stopping ecological degradation and enhancing farmers’ livelihoods. Yunzhou District in Shanxi Pro...
The agro-pastoral ecotone in Yinshanbeilu is the main potato-producing region. In recent years, the shift from rainfed to irrigated agriculture has created challenges in understanding potato water consumption patterns, water use efficiency, and irrig...
This study presents new phytolith data that reconstruct the vegetation patterns and environmental context of medieval sites in northeastern Romania, integrated with previously published archaeozoological evidence. Sediment samples from cultural layer...
Groundwater resources serve as the primary source of water in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China, where scarcity of water resources constrains the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. As a typical rainfed agricultural area, the a...
The ecological interface between grasslands and farmlands forms a critical landscape component, significantly contributing to the stability and functioning of ecosystems within the agro-pastoral transition zone of northern China. Nevertheless, the va...
The ecologically fragile agro-pastoral ecotone in northern China is characterized by relatively poor arable land quality. Yunzhou District in Datong City, which is situated within this transitional zone, boasts over 600 years of Hemerocallis citrina ...
Agro-pastoral dams (APDs) are an increasingly popular method of adaptation interventions improving communal water supply in rural West Africa. However, APDs are often constructed in areas where culturally heterogeneous pastoralists and farmers compet...
Ecosystem and associated ecosystem services (ESs) in the agro-pastoral transitional zone of northern China (APTZNC) are sensitive to climate change and human activities. Essential to designing targeted policy interventions toward achieving sustainabi...
The Agro-Pastoral Transitional Zone in northern China is a typical ecologically fragile area highly sensitive to climate change. Understanding how future climate change will affect the suitability of agricultural and pastoral land use in this region...
5 August 2020
The Green-for-Grain program (GGP) is the largest environmental restoration program in China. It is effective in controlling land desertification but at the same time is highly affected by regional differences. Ecosystem health, as an important indica...
Spatial distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) is important for the development of ecosystem carbon cycle models and assessment of soil quality. In this study, a total of 732 soil samples from 122 soil profiles (0–10, 10–20, 20–4...
Land use intensity is an important indicator of human activities, so we quantified the land use intensity and five ecosystem services (soil conservation, water conservation, carbon storage, net primary productivity (NPP), and crop production) in 13 s...
Ecological stoichiometry (ES) is an important index that reflects the balance of various elements in ecological processes. Therefore, it is of great significance to understand the soil nutrient cycle to clarify the environmental control of soil carbo...
28 January 2016
Chengde city is located in the agro–pastoral transitional zone in northern China near the capital city of Beijing, which has experienced large-scale ecological construction in the past three decades. This study quantitatively assessed the environment...
The Vaganov–Shashkin process-based model was used to explore the variation characteristic of the radial growth rate of Pinus tabulaeformis in the agro-pastoral transition zone in northern China. The tree-ring width chronologies of the four samp...
Monthly dynamics of ground-dwelling beetles remain poorly resolved in agro-pastoral ecotones. From June to September 2025, beetles were sampled monthly with pitfall traps in 81 permanent 1 m × 1 m quadrats across nine plots representing tempera...
In this paper, we use preliminary archaeological data spanning the Iron Age through Medieval periods (ca. 800 BCE to 1200 CE) in the Juuku Valley in Kyrgyzstan on the south side of Lake Issyk-Kul to model land use across vertical mountain zones. We h...
The agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China (APENC), a typical semi-arid and ecologically vulnerable zone, has experienced considerable shifts in eco-environmental quality (EEQ) over the past two decades under the combined pressures of climate change...
As part of the ecological barrier and an essential element of food security, the agro-pastoral ecotone is vital in northern China. Since soil fertility in northern China is low due to frequent surface disturbances, it is necessary to improve the prop...
Desertification is destabilizing the Agro-Pastoral Ecotone of Northern China (APENC) as a critical ecological barrier, making its monitoring and management a central challenge for dryland sustainability. We tracked desertification dynamics across the...
The water use efficiency (WUE) in North China is undergoing rapid changes due to climate warming and vegetation “greening”, significantly impacting the ecosystem’s carbon and water cycles. Existing research lacks quantitative analys...
The agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China (AENC) is a significant ecological barrier, where the topographical features play basic roles in land-use change. In order to reveal the influence of topographical factors on land-use changes in the AENC, w...
To improve their ability to plan for and respond to potential negative impacts of climate shocks, such as droughts and dry spells, in the Sahelian agricultural production systems, many farmers have adopted diversified coping and adaptation strategies...
Vegetation is the major component of the terrestrial ecosystem. Understanding both climate change and anthropogenically induced vegetation variation is essential for ecosystem management. In this study, we used an ensemble empirical mode decompositio...
The agro-pastoral transitional zone (APTZ) in Northern China is one of the most important ecological barriers of the world. The commonly-used method to identify the spatial distribution of ATPZ is to apply a threshold rule on climatic or land use ind...
This study aimed to appraise the role of local institutions in adaptation to changing climate at the local level in the Bilate Basin Agropastoral Livelihood Zone of Ethiopia. Thirty-one years of climate data were analyzed by employing the Mann–...
The dry stone wall landscape surrounding the town of Cres is a unique cultural landscape; it is one of the largest well-preserved historical olive groves in the Croatian Adriatic, while simultaneously serving as pasture for sheep. Still, there are cu...
In light of current global challenges of climate change, the over-exploitation of natural resources, and increasing demand for livestock products, the exploration of excellent forage crop resources holds great potential for development. Therefore, se...
In the past, during development processes, major ecological and environmental problems have occurred in the agro-pastoral ecotone of China, which have had a strong impact on regional sustainable development. As such, analyzing the evolution of the re...
The North China agro–pastoral zone is a large, ecologically fragile zone in the arid and semi-arid regions. Quantitative remote sensing inversion of soil organic carbon (SOC) in this region can facilitate understanding of the current status of...
Land desertification in the Agropastoral ecotone of arid and semi-arid regions poses significant threats to ecological security. Elucidating the geochemical characteristics and provenance of surface sediments is crucial for understanding desertificat...
The agro-pastoral ecotone of Gansu Province, a critical component of the ecological security barrier in northern China, is characterized by pronounced ecological fragility and climatic sensitivity. Investigating vegetation dynamics in this region is...
Global warming has intensified freeze–thaw activity in high-latitude and high-altitude regions; along the western sector of the farming–pastoral ecotone in northern China, pronounced seasonal freeze–thaw cycles now pose a severe thr...
The agro-pastoral transitional zone (APTZ) in northern China is a typical ecologically vulnerable zone and a comprehensive geographical transitional zone. Its land use pattern has significant type diversity and spatial interlocking, which is always r...
Regional- and biome-scale paleoecological analyses and archaeological syntheses in the mountain landscapes of the western Pyrenees suggest that the Long Anthropocene began with agropastoral land use at the onset of the Neolithic. Historical and geogr...
Improving water supply for irrigable farming and livestock purposes in communities in Africa is an increasingly popular approach for community-based adaptation interventions. A widespread intervention is the construction of agro-pastoral dams and irr...
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