The United States is the world's leading producer of soy. However many U.S. farmers are shifting from soy to corn in order to qualify for generous government subsidies intended to promote biofuel production. The rising price for soy has important consequences for Amazonian forests and savanna woodlands. (Letters)

The worldwide decline in amphibians has been attributed to several causes, especially habitat loss and disease.

For long, Hevelie Shohe and her family have been growing upland paddy on their traditional 'jhum' land on the hills of this Sema Naga village of Nagaland, but have had little to save. This autumn, the 45 year old farmer is busy taking care of the jatropha saplings she planted on one hectare of 'jhum' land. She hopes to double her income when they mature and their seeds sold for extraction of green fuel. Dec 2007

Agricultural diversification has been a well established traditional farming strategy adopted individually or collectively by Indian farmer or farming communities since time immemorial to minimize risk associated with specialized production system and to ensure household food security. The state of Chhattisgarh has launched a massive crop diversification programme to support double cropping, facilitate shift in cropping pattern towards cash crops and support development of non-farm allied services.

At a meeting of world mangrove experts held last year in Australia, it was unanimously agreed that we face the prospect of a world deprived of the services offered by mangrove ecosystems, perhaps within the next 100 years. Mangrove forests once covered more than 200,000 km2 of sheltered tropical and subtropical coastlines.

Land resources are limited and finite. There is bound to be conflict over land use. In a developing country like India, land use planning is applied at four broad scale: national, state, district and village (or small watershed). Different kinds of decisions are taken at such level, where the methods of planning and kinds of plan also differ.

A study was conducted to estimate the rate of solid and dissolved mass denudation from six prominent landuse systems of Bhetagad micro watershed, Gomti basin of Indian Central Himalaya. An investigation was also conducted to assess the seasonal variation in water quality parameters influenced by rainwater in the four sub-catchments of Gomti basin.

A model is developed to understand the relationship between satellite-derived NDVI and rainfall data in a large tropical catchment. Two Fourier-based modeling techniques with a seasonal component, viz. a seasonal model (SM) and a linear perturbation model (LPM) are tested, and their performance in reproducing the observed NDVI was evaluated. The methodology makes use of 15 years of 10-day composite time series data of rainfall and NDVI, which is estimated from NOAA-AVHRR data, both of which constitute concurrent data from 1982-96.