The paper focuses on conservation agriculture (CA), defined as minimal soil disturbance (no-till, NT) and permanent soil cover (mulch) combined with rotations, as a more sustainable cultivation system for the future. Cultivation and tillage play an important role in agriculture. The benefits of tillage in agriculture are explored before introducing conservation tillage (CT), a practice that was borne out of the American dust bowl of the 1930s. The paper then describes the benefits of CA, a suggested improvement on CT, where NT, mulch and rotations significantly improve soil properties and other biotic factors. The paper concludes that CA is a more sustainable and environmentally friendly management system for cultivating crops. Case studies from the rice-wheat areas of the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia and the irrigated maize-wheat systems of Northwest Mexico are used to describe how CA practices have been used in these two environments to raise production sustainably and profitably. Benefits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on global warming are also discussed. The paper concludes that agriculture in the next decade will have to sustainably produce more food from less land through more efficient use of natural resources and with minimal impact on the environment in order to meet growing population demands. Promoting and adopting CA management systems can help meet this goal.

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This paper represents the result of the IAEG C35 Commission "Monitoring methods and approaches in engineering geology applications" workgroup aimed to describe a general overview of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their potentiality in several engineering geology applications. The use of UAV has progressively increased in the last decade and nowadays started to be considered a standard research instrument for the acquisition of images and other information on demand over an area of interest. UAV represents a cheap and fast solution for the on-demand acquisition of detailed images of an area of interest and the creation of detailed 3D models and orthophoto. The use of these systems required a good background of data processing and a good drone pilot ability for the management of the flight mission in particular in a complex environment.

8A geoelectrical investigation of a slow moving earth slide-earth flow in Lower Jurassic Lias Group 9 rocks of the Cleveland basin, UK, is described. These mudrock slopes are particularly prone to failure 10 and are a major source of lowland landslides in the UK, but few attempts have been made to 11 spatially or volumetrically characterise the subsurface form of these slides. The primary aim of this 12 study was to consider the efficacy of fully three-dimensional geoelectrical imaging for landslide 13 investigation with reference to a geological setting typical of Lias Group escarpments. The approach 14 described here included a reconnaissance survey phase using two-dimensional electrical resistivity 15 tomography (ERT), resistivity mapping, self-potential (SP) profiling and mapping, followed by a 16 detailed investigation of an area of the landslide using three-dimensional (3D) ERT and self-potential 17 tomography (SPT). Interpretation of the geophysical data sets was supported by surface 18 observations (aerial LiDAR and differential GPS geomorphological surveys) and intrusive 19 investigations (boreholes and auger holes). The initial phase of the study revealed the existence of a 20 strong SP signature at the site consistent with a streaming potential source and established the 21 relationships between the main geological units, the geomorphologic expression of the landslide, 22 and the resistivity of the materials in and around the study area. The 3D SPT model generated during 23 the second phase of the study indicated drainage patterns across the landslide and preferential flow 24 from the low permeability mud rocks into the underlying more permeable sandstone formation. 25 Manuscript Click here to view linked References