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The mountainous ecosystems of Southeast Asia have experienced a tremendous increase in human activity over the last few decades. An integral part of land use change and land use intensification in the area is the changes in water and matter cycling that have taken place, a situation which calls for increased attention to be paid to resource management, particularly given the environmental vulnerability of the region. Building on four case studies that describe the consequences of such change and provide implications for resource management with regard to flooding, nutrient stocks and fluxes, and the fate of pesticides, we develop a general perspective on current matter and water related issues. This perspective will require us to integrate (1) knowledge on water and matter related processes, (2) the spatial and temporal scales on which they are active and through which they connect inside a watershed, and (3) their physiographic (site and land use specific) domains.

1 Introduction 2 Electromagnetic probes and light vector mesons 3 Hadronic resonance spectroscopy 4 Strangeness 5 Open charm probes 6 Charmonium 7 Excitations of color-superconducting matter 8 Summary and relations to observables

The Brazilian federal states of Piaui and Ceara are characterized by a semiarid environment that is highly variable in terms of soil resources and climatic conditions. The assessment of areas with high potential far agricultural production as weil as the identification and quantification of constraints to crop production are high priorities for the planning authorities of both states. Attempts towards land suitability classification have been made with different approaches at the regional scale for Ceara (SEARA 1988) and Piaui (Cordeiro 1985) and at the national scale for Brazil (SUPLAN 1979; EMBRAPA 2000). However, national classification approaches are not detailed enough for regional planning and, in some cases, lack climatic evaluations. The need for land resource information has been confirmed by a series of joint workshops with the participation of scientists of the research program WAVES and representatives of several ministries of the state of Ceara. Far this purpose, the Soil and Land Resources Information System for the states of Plaui and CEara (SPICE) has been established. The present paper focuses on applications of SPICE with special emphasis on the assessment of the spatial and temporal crop production risk. Further examples of applications are available on the SPICE homepage (http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/spice).

The socioeconomic development of northeast Brazil is highly related to the occurrence of droughts (Villa 2000). Therefore, a large part of northeast Brazil is also known as the polygon of drought. Frequency, duration and dimension of droughts seem to be closely linked to the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) phenomenon (Gommes et al. 1998), leading to a strong spatial and temporal inter- and intraannual variation in rainfall distribution (Conti 1995). Even in years with a high total rainfall amount, dry spells of up to 3 weeks and more may occur, reducing the agricultural production substantially. In more than one-third of the area of the northeastern Brazilian federal state of Piaui, the production of annual crops is strongly hampered by severe droughts (IBGE 1999). Additionally, the crop production of this area is often adversely affected by the widespread inherent low soil fertility. Nevertheless, agriculture is the most important economic activity in rural areas of northeastern Brazil and has to guarantee the subsistence of many small-scale farmers and their families. Climate changes, one of the key issues of the Global Change discussion, may exacerbate drought proneness of northeast Brazil (Nisbet 1994; Bohm et al. 2000).