Land abandonment

Holding back the sea—as water levels continue to rise—may always be technically feasible however, it will not always be technically sound or economically practical. In areas where the long-range cost or the environmental damage due to shoreline stabilization is exorbitant, it will be prudent to move back from the shore. Planned retreat requires years of preparation. A retreat can occur as a gradual process, or as catastrophic land abandonment. 

The Environment Agency was set up by the Environment Act 1995 which also makes provision for contaminated lands, abandoned mines, control of pollution and the conservation of natural resources and the environment. 

Irrigation for agriculture is a major cause of declining water quality in the quest for increased yield, poorly-managed irrigation systems have resulted in salinization of soils and water and sometime to land abandonment. 

Whether offshore or on land an effective well abandonment programme should address the following concerns ... 

Onshore processing facilities, and modules brought onshore, have to be cleaned of all hazardous compounds and scrapped. Cellars of single wells, drilling pads, access roads and buildings will have to be removed. If reservoir compaction affects the surface area above the abandoned field future land use may be prevented, in particular in coastal or low land environments. 

Crop Rotations and Diversification. For thousands of years farmers have known that planting their crops in a new location about every 2 years helped reduce Insect, disease, and weed problems. Indeed, crop rotations are effective in reducing many pest problems and are often highly cost effective (15, 16). Unfortunately for many crops, the trend has been toward abandonment of rotations and increased monocultures. Where rotations are not practiced, certain pests tend to multiply as the crops are cultured on the same land year after year (23). As a result, the density of pest populations increases to levels that necessitate heavy pesticide applications. 

King, T. V. V. (ed.), 1995, Environmental considerations of active and abandoned mine lands, lessons from Summitville, Colorado. US Geological Survey Bulletin 2220. 

Petroleum, natural gas, and synthetic fuels are excluded from the definition of a hazardous substance, and the definitions of pollutants and contaminants under CERCLA this is known as the Petroleum Exclusion. Although the EPA has the authority to regulate the release or threatened release of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant, the release of petroleum, natural gas, and synthetic fuels from active or abandoned pits or other land disposal units is currently exempt from CERCLA. Such sites cannot use Superfund dollars for cleanup, nor can the EPA enforce an oil and gas operator, landowner, or other individual to clean up a release under CERCLA. Substances exempt include such materials as brine, crude oil, and refined products (i.e., gasoline and diesel fuel) and fractions. 

The main objective of this project was to study some of the ecological processes that occur during secondary succession in warm and humid tropics. This process is triggered after a perturbation in the tropical rain forest or the abandonment of crop land. ... 

The original need that led to development of trace chemical sensors for explosives was the need to restore land that had been abandoned to public or private use. This land was abandoned because of the presence of, or perception of the presence of, mines or unexploded ordnance, often called UXO. These potentially lethal items could be the result of some earlier armed conflict. In that case it is now common to refer to them as explosive remnants of war, or ERW. In some cases the war that left its remnants was concluded many years ago. Dangerous ERW are still found on World War I battlefields, and occasionally on... 

Starting fi om the fer past (Chapter 16.1), until our days (Ch ters 16.2.1-16.2.4), threats to natural product diversity are examined in the Tables 16.2.5.11-V, although disentangling the causes is seldom possible. A combination of various factors is usually responsible for the disappearance of metabolites. Threatening of natural product diversity has mostly political causes, first of all in permitting an indiscriminate use of the car. Therefore, the division of land into biomes, and the biological zonation of the oceans, have been abandoned in Tables 16.1.5.I1-V in favor of the geopolitical subdivision. 

It may be surprising that losses in marine natural product diversity (Table 16.2.5.II) are better documented than for natural products on land, in spite of the difficulty in collecting rare and low-yielding marine species. The paradox finds an explanation. Marine biodiversity has constituted in the past few years the largest untapped resource of novel natural products. The pharmaceutical industry entered the game early, but abandoned the scene soon now it is back to marine natural products, albeit mainly for funding research at universities. In a time of powerful methodologies for the purification and structural elucidation of compounds, this has rapidly secured many unusual marine metabolites of a type never found on land. 

Smith, K. S., Campbell, D. L. et at. 2002. Chapter C, Toolkit for the rapid screening and characterization of waste piles on abandoned mine lands. In Seal II, R. R. Foley, N. K. (eds) Progress on Geoenvironmental Models for Selected Mineral Deposit Types. US Geological Survey, Denver CO, USA, US Geological Survey Open-File Report 02-195. 

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