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Agricultural land cover and its changing extent are directly related to human activities, which have an adverse impact on the environment and ecosystems. The historical knowledge of crop production and its cultivation area is a key element. Such data provide a base for monitoring and mapping spatio-temporal changes in agricultural land cover/use, which is of great significance to examine its impacts on environmental systems. Historical maps and related data obtained from historical archives can be effectively used for reconstruction purposes through using sample data from ground observations, government inventories, or other historical sources. This study considered historical population and cropland survey data obtained from Ottoman Archives and cropland suitability map, accessibility, and geophysical attributes as ancillary data to estimate non-irrigated crop production and its corresponding cultivation area in the 1840s Bursa Region, Turkey. We used the regression analysis approach to estimate agricultural land area and grain production for the unknown data points in the study region. We provide the spatial distribution of production and its cultivation area based on the estimates of regression models. The reconstruction can be used in line with future historical research aiming to model landscape, climate, and ecosystems to assess the impact of human activities on the environmental systems in preindustrial times in the Bursa Region context., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been treated as a disruptor of environmental and socioeconomic equilibrium both in ancient times and in modern-day Peru. Recent work in the coastal desert plain, known as the Pampa de Mocan, challenges this view by demonstrating that prehispanic irrigation systems were designed to incorporate floods and convert them into productive waters. Archaeological investigations in this landscape reveal a 2,000-y history of floodwater farming embedded in conventional canal systems. Together with a pollen record recovered from a prehispanic well, these data suggest that the Pampa de Mocan was a flexible landscape, capable of taking advantage of El Niño floodwaters as well as river water. In sharp contrast to modern-day flood mitigation efforts, ancient farmers used floodwaters to develop otherwise marginal landscapes, such as the Pampa de Mocan, which in turn mitigated risk during El Niño years. These archaeological data speak to contemporary policy debates in the face of increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters and question whether El Niño Southern Oscillation events should be approached as a form of temporary disorder or as a form of periodic abundance., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

Introduction: since the 2000s the nutritional status of Spanish rural populations has been studied by anthropometric history. But despite this undoubted progress, we hardly have comparative studies on the height and biological inequality between agrarian zones of different productive specialization (irrigated and dryland agriculture)., Objectives: to analyse the nutritional inequality in agrarian zones of different productive specialization in Mediterranean Spain (irrigated and dryland agriculture) during the process of modernization., Methods: we use height data of 146,041 conscripts called for recruitment in ten municipalities (72,557 in irrigated areas and 73,514 in dryland areas). We estimate average height, coefficients of variation and percentiles according to agrarian specialization., Results: between the cohorts of 1840 and 1965 the nutritional status improved. The average height grew 9.1 cm. The conscripts measured in the irrigated areas were higher than the conscripts measured in the dryland areas (differences of 1.8 cm). At the end of the study period, the average height growth was greater in the irrigated ones. The analysis of coefficients of variation (CV) and percentiles show, however, that the nutritional inequality was greater in dryland areas., Conclusions: there are significant differences in the average height according to patterns of agrarian specialization in Mediterranean Spain and a clear relative advantage in irrigated areas versus dryland. Various explanatory factors that could be future research lines are discussed.

The access to water and the engineered landscapes accommodating its collection and allocation are pivotal issues for assessing sustainability. Recent mapping, sediment coring, and formal excavation at Tikal, Guatemala, have markedly expanded our understanding of ancient Maya water and land use. Among the landscape and engineering feats identified are the largest ancient dam identified in the Maya area of Central America; the posited manner by which reservoir waters were released; construction of a cofferdam for dredging the largest reservoir at Tikal; the presence of ancient springs linked to the initial colonization of Tikal; the use of sand filtration to cleanse water entering reservoirs; a switching station that facilitated seasonal filling and release; and the deepest rock-cut canal segment in the Maya Lowlands. These engineering achievements were integrated into a system that sustained the urban complex through deep time, and they have implications for sustainable construction and use of water management systems in tropical forest settings worldwide.

This is the story of failure: in this case, an irrigation project that never met its boosters' expectations. Between 1880 and 1930, Wichita Falls entrepreneur Joseph Kemp dreamed of an agrarian Eden on the Texas rolling plains. Kemp promoted reclamation and conservation and envisioned the Big Wichita River Valley as the "Irrigated Valley." But the process of bringing dams and irrigation ditches to the Big Wichita River ignored knowledge of the river and local environment, which ultimately was key to making these complex systems work. The boosters faced serious ecological limitations and political obstacles in their efforts to conquer water, accomplishing only parts of the grandiose vision. Ultimately, salty waters and poor drainage doomed the project. While the livestock industry survived and the oil business thrived in the subsequent decades, the dream of idyllic irrigated farmsteads slowly disappeared.

Favored by neoliberal agrarian policies, the production of fresh crops for international markets has become a common strategy for economic development in Mexico and other Latin American countries. But as some scholars have argued, the global fresh produce industry in developing countries in which fresh crops are produced for consumer markets in affluent nations implies “virtual water flows,” the transfer of high volumes of water embedded in these crops across international borders. This article examines the local effects of the production of fresh produce in the San Quintín Valley in northwestern Mexico for markets in the United States. Although export agriculture has fostered economic growth and employment opportunities for indigenous farm laborers, it has also led to the overexploitation of underground finite water resources, and an alarming decline of the quantity and quality of water available for residents’ domestic use. I discuss how neoliberal water policies have further contributed to water inequalities along class and ethnic lines, the hardships settlers endure to secure access to water for their basic needs, and the political protests and social tensions water scarcity has triggered in the region. Although the production of fresh crops for international markets is promoted by organizations such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank as a model for economic development, I argue that it often produces water insecurity for the poorest, threatening the UN goal of ensuring access to clean water as a universal human right.

This article uses the concepts of "human stewardship" and "ruined landscape" as a theoretical framework for analysing the community's perception of landscape change in the ancient tula well system of Borana in southern Ethiopia. The ancient tula well system, the main permanent water source, has been in operation for more than five centuries and it closely links human activity and the environment. The welfare of the tula well system and the performance of the Borana pastoral system are directly related. Borana management of the tula wells uses concepts such as laaf aadaa seeraa and laaf bade to differentiate between ‘land managed by customary laws’ (hereafter human stewardship) and ‘lost’ or ‘ruined’ land (laaf bade). The cultural landscapes of the ancient wells have undergone changes from ecosystems featuring ‘human stewardship’ (before the 1960s), that is, laaf aadaa seeraa to ‘ruined landscapes’ (after the 1960s), that is, laaf bade. Our interest is in understanding how the Borana perceive the impact of land use changes from these two conceptual perspectives. In group discussions, key informant interviews and household surveys across five of the nine well clusters, we found that the society described the changed tula cultural landscape in terms of drivers of well dynamics (i.e. use and disuse), break up of land use zonations, patterns of human settlement (traditional versus peri-urban), expansion of crop cultivation, and changes in environmental quality. Using the two concepts, we analysed linkages between changing patterns of land use that transformed the system from laaf aadaa seeraa, which ensured human stewardship, to laaf bade, which resulted in ruined landscapes. From these we analysed environmental narratives that showed how the society differentiated the past human stewardship that ensured sustainable landscape management from the present ruining of tula well cultural landscapes.

Various land management strategies are used to prevent land degradation and keep land productive. Often land management strategies applied in certain areas focus on the context of the physical environment but are incompatible with the social environment where they are applied. As a result, such strategies are ignored by land users and land degradation becomes difficult to control. This study observes the impacts of land management in the upland watersheds of the Uporoto Mountains in South West Tanzania. In spite of various land management practices used in the area, 38% of the studied area experienced soil fertility loss, 30% gully erosion, 23% soil loss, 6% biodiversity loss and drying up of river sources. Land management methods that were accepted and adopted were those contributing to immediate livelihood needs. These methods did not control land resource degradation, but increased crop output per unit of land and required little labour. Effective methods of controlling land degradation were abandoned or ignored because they did not satisfy immediate livelihood needs. This paper concludes that Integrating poor people's needs would transform non-livelihood-based land management methods to livelihood-based ones. Different ways of transforming these land management methods are presented and discussed.