About this Research Topic

Background

The need to increase agricultural productivity due to the high demand of animal feeding and to provide food for growing global population has placed intense pressure on the agriculture landscape causing land degradation. This issue has heavy consequences on smallholder farmers, which constitute the majority of the global agricultural community, making the access to sustainable nutrition ambitious for many communities. Reducing land degradation, understanding the process, causes and effects, and improving the management of natural resources became among the targets of Sustainable Development Goals. Nowadays, the implementation of context specific and innovative land management practices is a widely recognized solutions to ending land degradation (Hurni et al., 2010). Despite this, it has never been implemented as widely as intended and little is known about their effectiveness in terms of restoring landscapes, and boosting food and nutrition security. The lack of long-term observations and actions contributed to the limited knowledge available about the role of land management practices in food security. To this end, assessing and documenting the role and effectiveness of land management practices in food security is a relevant and critical research issue that requires appropriate attention. This Research Topic aims to collect articles to address: i) best land management practices in effectively transforming degraded landscapes to food producing landscapes; and ii) documenting success and failure stories of land management practices in addressing food and nutrition security.

We therefore welcome researchers to submit high-quality research papers on the following topics but not limited to:

1. Innovative land management practices addressing food and nutrition security
2. Success and failure of land management initiatives
3. Experiences on effectiveness of land management practices in restoring degraded and abandoned croplands
4. Scalability of land management practices
5. Opportunities and barriers of land management practices

Keywords: Nutrition insecurity, Land use, Watershed management, Land degradation, Land restoration, Smallholder farmers

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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