This study provides a better understanding of the perspective and attitudes of farmers towards sustainable land management (SLM) practices in central Spain. Farmer's willingness to change from conventional tillage to cover crops in vineyards is seen as an indicator for adoption of sustainable agriculture. Two complementary approaches were used: open interviews (n = 25) and surveys (n = 64). The portrait of these winegrowers is of mature farmers, owners of their lands and conscious of soil erosion problems (81%), although not on their own lands. They observe soil degradation (45%); however, they are more conscious of problems in their vines or grapes (64%). Only 32% would be willing to use cover crops to avoid erosion. The barriers for adoption were mainly related to water constraints, lack of knowledge and inability to accept production decreases. Results indicate an underlying lack of information on SLM. They show confusion or mistakes regarding the relationship between tillage and erosion. Young farmers are more prone to change practices. Scientific results are not effectively communicated; there are no efficient local structures to provide them with knowledge and advice in their work, including guidance on environmental issues. The EU agri‐environment payments cover the costs of SLM practices for avoiding erosion or compaction and increasing SOC. In spite of that, participants do not apply for subsidies to compensate the income foregone. Policy makers, extension services and scientists have to face this situation to tackle the limited knowledge transfer revealed in this study. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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In Latin America, Argentina is second -behind Brazil -in extent of drylands: 55% of its territory. Research on desertification and dryland degradation has a lengthy tradition, being undertaken even prior to the establishment of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. The paper aims to analyse desertification research in Argentina, the disciplines from which its knowledge arises and the topics receiving greater attention. The work focuses on the results from descriptive, bibliometric and social network analyses of a sample of articles on desertification in scientific journals indexed in Web of Science. A visual representation of citation relationships was created considering keywords such as 'desertification', 'dry*land*', '*arid' and 'development', 'policy' or 'economy' among others, in 'Argentina'. According to this search, the number of papers per year dealing with desertification in Argentina is only 4·3. National knowledge, usually categorized as traditional knowledge, is barely captured by international databases. The challenge for the scientific community is to make traditional knowledge visible and disseminate the findings. Results demonstrate that desertification research in Argentina is in a great proportion related to studies of soil erosion and soil degradation, and only in a minor proportion to socioeconomic issues. However, desertification problems are the outcome of interactions among physical-biological, socioeconomic and political dimensions, and therefore, the science summoned to analyse them must not only be a science centred on isolated themes but also one resulting from interdisciplinary studies and integrated approaches.

This study intends to understand how desertification research is organised in Spain. We assume that a strong communication between scientific knowledge and stakeholders is needed to slow down and reverse the impacts of land degradation on drylands. With this purpose, we conducted an in‐depth study at a national level in Spain. The work focused on a sample of published references on desertification in scientific journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). The keywords were related to ‘desertification’, ‘drylands’, ‘land’, ‘soil’, ‘development’ and ‘Spain’. Multivariate analysis, bibliometric techniques and network analysis were used in order to (i) identify research categories and their temporal evolution throughout the period under consideration (1989–2012), (ii) determine if there were different approaches amongst different regions affected by desertification in Spain, (iii) establish the relationships between research categories, (iv) characterise types of co‐authorship and (v) map out the Spanish network on the science of desertification. Erosion‐soil degradation and soil analysis are the most important research categories, whereas climatic issues are subsidiary and quite isolated from the rest of topics. Very few articles consider ‘desertification’ as the main theme. Socio‐economic issues have scant links with the core of biophysical science. The Spanish network on the science of desertification shows a low density. Moreover, the relationships between universities/research centres with other stakeholders are marginal. This is not the best scenario for transforming scientific knowledge into practical tools for policy makers and land users. Knowledge transfer should be a priority for national desertification programmes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fighting land and soil degradation is in the mandate of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). However, it is often suggested that a lack of scientific guidance has resulted from inadequate institutional mechanisms to channel science into UNCCD decision making, rather than from a lack of research on UNCCD‐related issues. To explore this issue in more depth, this study explores the corpus of international publications dealing with land and/or with soil degradation. We extracted information from the ‘Web of Science’. By applying bibliometric methods and data mining, we mapped the key actors (laboratories, teams, and institutions) involved in research on land and on soils. Several filters were applied to the databases in combination with the word ‘desertification’. The further use of text mining software (Tetralogie®) allowed the analyses of similarities and differences between keywords, disciplines, authors, and regions and identifies obvious clusters. Understanding interconnections between these clusters ultimately allowed a first diagnosis of some of the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific community dealing with desertification. This type of detailed analyses can contribute to clarify the scientific landscape at large, and further in‐depth studies could lead to improvements in the way scientific advice is channeled into the UNCCD. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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A sample group of 119 farmers from a semi‐arid district of Madrid was interviewed to determine the knowledge of individuals about soil conservation and management. Farmers commonly identify physical factors in the landscape that are visually recognizable and those chemical factors that clearly affect productivity. Often, factors, such as salinity or pH that require laboratory analysis, are less readily identified. Farmer knowledge of soils is influenced by their main source of income, gender, education and age. Although there is a high degree of correspondence between scientific and traditional knowledge of soil, some gaps have been identified, notably those related to erosion. Key steps identified for promoting the adoption of sustainable soil management practices to farmers were as follows: involvement of public institutions, the need for increased agricultural prices and an improvement in training and public awareness. Farmers were aware of their own limitations and demanded capacity building, technical and policy support.