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This Toolbox is a guide to targeting, designing and implementing gully and stream bank erosion control activities in Great Barrier Reef (GBR) catchments. This third edition builds on 7 years of implementing these activities in multiple programs and it aims to inform the ongoing efforts to reduce the amount of fine sediment and associated nutrients delivered to the GBR lagoon. Sub‑soil erosion, predominantly from gullies and stream banks, contributes the vast bulk of the fine sediment load delivered to the GBR. The large area and extensive erosion in GBR catchments, and the limited resources available, make it important for erosion control to be targeted to cost‑effective sites and implemented using best practice based on best available information. Landholder support and site maintenance increase the likelihood that sediment reductions will persist over the long term.

Soil erosion is generally recognized as the dominant process of land degradation. The formation and expansion of gullies is often a highly significant process of soil erosion. However, our ability to assess and simulate gully erosion and its impacts remains very limited. This is especially so at regional to continental scales. As a result, gullying is often overlooked in policies and land and catchment management strategies. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made over the past decades. Based on a review of >590 scientific articles and policy documents, we provide a state-of-the-art on our ability to monitor, model and manage gully erosion at regional to continental scales. In this review we discuss the relevance and need of assessing gully erosion at regional to continental scales (Section 1); current methods to monitor gully erosion as well as pitfalls and opportunities to apply them at larger scales (section 2); field-based gully erosion research conducted in Europe and European Russia (section 3); model approaches to simulate gully erosion and its contribution to catchment sediment yields at large scales (section 4); data products that can be used for such simulations (section 5); and currently existing policy tools and needs to address the problem of gully erosion (section 6). Section 7 formulates a series of recommendations for further research and policy development, based on this review. While several of these sections have a strong focus on Europe, most of our findings and recommendations are of global significance.

With the reoccurrence of food contaminations and growing concerns about the effects of current agriculture practices, society is rethinking their food choices. Grocery consumers have begun to put more time and thought into their food purchases, some even researching where it comes from. This shift in consumer behavior toward grocery purchases coupled with the economic downturn in recent years, created a demand for inexpensive, environmentally conscious, and healthy food. These driving forces have created a market in which food cooperatives are beginning to re-emerge. In this project I will detail and define food cooperatives, their history, the driving forces behind them, and follow a local startup food cooperative in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area.

Terrestrial cosmogenic nuclides (TCNs) such as Beryllium-10 (¹⁰Be) are now routinely used to reconstruct erosional rates over tens of thousands of years at increasingly large basin scales (> 100,000 km²). In Australia, however, the approach and its assumptions have not been systematically tested within a single, large drainage basin. This study measures ¹⁰Be concentrations in river sediments from the Burdekin catchment, one of Australia's largest coastal catchments, to determine long-term (> 10,000 years), time-integrated rates of sediment generation and denudation. A nested-sampling design was used to test for effects of increasing catchment scale on nuclide concentrations with upstream catchment areas ranging from 4 to 130,000 km². Beryllium-10 concentrations in sediment samples collected from the upstream headwater tributaries and mid-stream locations range from 1.8 to 2.89 × 10⁵ atoms g¯¹ and data confirm that nuclide concentrations are well and rapidly mixed downstream. Sediment from the same tributaries consistently yielded 10Be concentrations in the range of their upstream samples. Overall, no decrease in ¹⁰Be concentrations can be observed at the range of catchment scales measured here. The mean denudation rate for all river sediment samples throughout the Fanning subcatchment (1100 km²) is 18.47 m Ma¯¹, which compares with the estimate at the end of the Burdekin catchment (130,000 km²) of 16.22 m Ma¯¹. Nuclide concentrations in the lower gradient western and southern catchments show a higher degree of variability, and several complications emerged as a result of the contrasting geomorphic processes and settings. This study confirms the ability of TCNs to determine long-term denudation rates in Australia and highlights some important considerations in the model assumptions that may affect the accuracy of limited sampling in large, low-gradient catchments with long storage times.