Ecological Risk Assessment and Management of Forest Fires in Tamil Nadu, India: A MaxEnt Model-Based Approach for Strategic Resource Allocation and Fire Mitigation.

Forest fires are integral to forest ecosystems as they influence nutrient cycling, plant regeneration, tree density, and biodiversity. However, human-induced climate change and activities have made forest fires more frequent, more intense, and more widespread, exacerbating their ecological and socioeconomic impact. Forest fires shape Tamil Nadu's diverse forest ecosystems, yet rising anthropogenic pressure and a warmer, drier climate have increased both their frequency and severity.

Unraveling changes in deltas: Exploring drivers and consequences through the lens of the IPBES conceptual framework.

Deltas have a remarkable capacity to sustain human populations, owing to their productivity and biodiversity. The increasing demand for fertile land and valuable resources in deltas has driven dramatic anthropogenic changes in deltas around the world, resulting in their ecological degradation. To make informed decisions regarding management of land in deltas, it is essential to expand the current understanding of the underlying causes and consequences of delta changes.

Actions to halt biodiversity loss generally benefit the climate.

The two most urgent and interlinked environmental challenges humanity faces are climate change and biodiversity loss. We are entering a pivotal decade for both the international biodiversity and climate change agendas with the sharpening of ambitious strategies and targets by the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Within their respective Conventions, the biodiversity and climate interlinked challenges have largely been addressed separately.

Exploring Indigenous and Local Knowledge and Practices (ILKPs) in Traditional Jhum Cultivation for Localizing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Case Study from Zunheboto District of Nagaland, India.

Globally, shifting cultivation is known to be an important driver of tropical deforestation. However, in this paper, we argue that it can be sustainably managed if the environmental boundary conditions, laid by the traditional customs and practices, are fully respected. We narrate an empirical study from the Zunheboto district of Nagaland, India, where we deployed a mixed research method to explore the Indigenous and Local Knowledge and Practices (ILKPs) associated with shifting cultivation (aka Jhum), particularly concerning farm-level practices, forest and biodiversity conservation, and disaster risk reduction measures.

Outcome-Based Assessment of the Payment for Mountain Agriculture: A Community-Based Approach to Countering Land Abandonment in Japan.

Agricultural land accounts for 37% of the world's terrestrial area, and the multiple functions of agroecosystems-providing food, soil and water retention, and various cultural services-are of great importance for sustainable land management. To ensure that multifunctionality, payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes have been developed for heterogeneous agroecosystems. However, the effects of the schemes have not been fully measured because, in most cases, they have been implemented as action-oriented programs rather than outcome-based payments.

Analysis of the ability of water resources to reduce the urban heat island in the Tokyo megalopolis.

Simulation procedure integrated with multi-scale in horizontally regional-urban-point levels and in vertically atmosphere-surface-unsaturated-saturated layers, was newly developed in order to predict the effect of urban geometry and anthropogenic exhaustion on the hydrothermal changes in the atmospheric/land and the interfacial areas of the Japanese megalopolis. The simulated results suggested that the latent heat flux in new water-holding pavement (consisting of porous asphalt and water-holding filler made of steel by-products based on silica compound) has a strong impact on hydrologic cycle and cooling temperature in comparison with the observed heat budget. We evaluated the relationship between the effect of groundwater use as a heat sink to tackle the heat island and the effect of infiltration on the water cycle in the urban area.