Socioecology Research Today

Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. At a country level, some populations use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water required for its production. Here, we investigate the dependence of demographic growth on [...]

Studies have shown that socioeconomic and environmental factors have direct/indirect influences on TB. This research focuses on TB prevalence of Hong Kong in relation to its compact urban development comprising of high-rise and high-density residential dwellings caused by rapid population growth and limited land resources. It has been postulated that occupants living on higher levels [...]

The history of sweet potato in the Pacific has long been an enigma. Archaeological, linguistic, and ethnobotanical data suggest that prehistoric human-mediated dispersal events contributed to the distribution in Oceania of this American domesticate. According to the “tripartite hypothesis,” sweet potato was introduced into Oceania from South America in pre-Columbian times and was then later [...]

► In 2004, one fourth of global land use was for internationally traded products. ► Net land use displaced from rich to poor countries was 6% of the total global land use. ► Still, rich countries had more domestic land available per capita than poor countries. ► Per capita land footprints increased with affluence, largely [...]

This review contrasts the history and current paradigms of SWM practices and policies in industrialized countries with the current challenges and complexities faced in developing country SWM. In industrialized countries, public health, environment, resource scarcity, climate change, and public awareness and participation have acted as SWM drivers towards the current paradigm of integrated SWM. However, [...]

Although ozone is well-documented to reduce crop yields in the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plain, there is little knowledge of its effects in other parts of south Asia. We surveyed crops close to the city of Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, for visible injury, linking this to passive measurements of ozone concentrations. Foliar injury was found on [...]

Water and its influence on plants likely exerted strong adaptive pressures in human evolution. Understanding relationships among water, plants, and early humans is limited both by incomplete terrestrial records of environmental change and by indirect proxy data for water availability. Here we present a continuous record of stable hydrogen-isotope compositions (expressed as δD values) for [...]

The role of savannas during the course of early human evolution has been debated for nearly a century, in part because of difficulties in characterizing local ecosystems from fossil and sediment records. Here, we present high-resolution lipid biomarker and isotopic signatures for organic matter preserved in lake sediments at Olduvai Gorge during a key juncture [...]

Societal pressure on the global land and freshwater resources is increasing as a result of the rising food demand by the growing human population, dietary changes, and the enhancement of biofuel production induced by the rising oil prices and recent changes in United States and European Union bioethanol policies. Many countries and corporations have started [...]

The article argues, on the contrary, that there is solid historical evidence to suggest that ‘environment’ should also, perhaps primarily, be understood as a social concept, or rather as an extension of the social into nature. As conventional environmental expertise has failed to provide the advice needed to question the driving forces behind environmental degradation [...]