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ABSTRACTLand-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies of conservation, connecting conservation with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly the frontier concept – allows assessing the patterns, actors, and drivers of conservation. We propose that land conservation can be analysed through three different perspectives. First, conservation can be framed as efforts to slow or stop other frontiers. Second, the expansion of conservation could itself be described as a frontier process, similarly leading to institutional and cultural reorganization, and sometimes conflicts (e.g. green grabbing). Third, frontiers can be seen as spaces where multiple land uses, including conservation, interact. Analysing conservation through these perspectives could be particularly powerful to thoroughly consider the social-ecological contexts in which conservation happens, and thus to bridge the disciplines of Land System Science and Conservation Science.

Maintaining or restoring connectivity among wildlife populations is a primary strategy to overcome the negative impacts of habitat fragmentation. Yet, current connectivity planning efforts typically assess landscape resistance, the ability of organisms to cross various biophysical elements in a landscape, while overlooking the various ways in which human behaviors influence connectivity. Here, we introduce the concept of “anthropogenic resistance” to capture the impacts of human behaviors on species' movement through a landscape. We discuss psychological and socioeconomic factors that influence the degree of anthropogenic resistance, such as the economic value or the risks posed by a species, and suggest methods to estimate and include anthropogenic resistance in connectivity analyses. Finally, we highlight how addressing anthropogenic resistance through a social-ecological perspective can lead to better outcomes for both humans and wildlife. We call for multidisciplinary approaches in connectivity planning to ensure the functionality of landscapes and sustainability of populations in the long term.

Trade agreements could help to protect human rights, critical ecosystems, and the climate—but only if sustainability becomes a cornerstone of international trade. The EU-Mercosur trade agreement fails to meet our three tenets of sustainable trade agreements: (1) inclusion of local communities, (2) transparency mechanisms to trace commodities and provide open-access information, and (3) enforcement to legally uphold sustainability commitments.

ABSTRACTLand system science and affiliated research linked to sustainability require improved understanding and theorization of land and its change as a social-ecological system (SES). The absence of a general land-use theory, anchored in the social subsystem but with explicit links to the environmental subsystem, hampers this effort. Drawing on land-use explanations, meta-analyses, and associated frameworks, we advance a broad framework structure of eight elements – aggregations of explanatory variables – with links to the biophysical subsystem, for systematic comparisons of extant explanations. Tests and models can be employed to identify which set of variables and their configurations provide robust explanations of across land uses, identifying the potential for theory development. The framework and its application are applicable to both top-down and bottom-up explanatory approaches employed in the social sciences. Links to the environmental subsystem invite future exploration of SES explanations that reach across the different dimensions of global change and sustainability science.

Tropical forests are vital for global biodiversity, carbon storage and local livelihoods, yet they are increasingly under threat from human activities. Large-scale land acquisitions have emerged as an important mechanism linking global resource demands to forests in the Global South, yet their influence on tropical deforestation remains unclear. Here we perform a multicountry assessment of the links between large-scale land acquisitions and tropical forest loss by combining a new georeferenced database of 82,403 individual land deals—covering 15 countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—with data on annual forest cover and loss between 2000 and 2018. We find that land acquisitions cover between 6% and 59% of study-country land area and between 2% and 79% of their forests. Compared with non-investment areas, large-scale land acquisitions were granted in areas of higher forest cover in 11 countries and had higher forest loss in 52% of cases. Oil palm, wood fibre and tree plantations were consistently linked with enhanced forest loss while logging and mining concessions showed a mix of outcomes. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale land acquisitions can lead to elevated deforestation of tropical forests, highlighting the role of local policies in the sustainable management of these ecosystems.

ABSTRACTImpacts of cattle production vary among different production systems, but data on their distribution is scarce for most world regions. In this work, we combine datasets on cattle vaccination locations and land cover in a regression framework to define and map major cattle production systems in the Argentinean Dry Chaco. We also explore how cattle occurrence relates to spatial determinants. Results indicate that the region harbors about 5.5 million heads. Cattle density was mainly described by the share of pasture (69.9%), cropland (28.1%) and aridity (23.8%). We identified 12-major cattle production systems: six cow-calf, three whole-cycle, and three fattening systems. Of these, four systems had high woodland cover (>85%). Data generated is available in a website. Understanding the distribution of cattle production systems is important to assess the environmental impacts of beef production at broad scales. Integrating vaccination data with land-cover information provides a promising avenue to identify livestock systems.

Letter to the Editor

Changes in the production or consumption of agricultural commodities in one place can drastically affect land use and the environment elsewhere. We show how changes in beef production and consumption in Russia following the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991 contributed to the emergence of a beef trade linkage between Brazil and Russia. We argue that the decline of Russian beef production after 1991, the rebound of domestic consumption since the late 1990s, the global beef trade constellation of the early 2000s, and the booming Brazilian cattle sector during the same periods forged a strong and lasting telecoupling in the beef trade between Brazil and Russia. As a result, Russia became the largest importer of both CO2and non-CO2emissions embodied in Brazilian beef exports since the 2000s. Our review exemplifies how the combination of institutional and socioeconomic shocks along with major changes in global markets can couple food systems and redistribute environmental footprints across long distances. Incorporating telecouplings in assessments of sustainable food systems is therefore important.

ABSTRACTLand-use decisions can change abruptly in response to shocks, and warfare and armed conflicts are among the most drastic and globally frequent shocks. Yet, our understanding of where armed conflict affects land systems, how land-use patterns are impacted, and how far-reaching and persistent these changes are, is partial. We used a spatially detailed dataset on armed conflict and a literature review to explore these questions. A number of key insights emerged from our study: (1) warfare and armed conflict affect land systems mainly in more densely populated areas, regardless of the dominating land use; (2) warfare and armed conflict can impact land systems in major ways, but these effects are diverse and not unidirectional; (3) warfare and armed conflict primarily affects land systems locally, but can forge telecouplings; and (4) although the impact of warfare and armed conflict is often immediate, it can instigate long-lasting land-use legacies.

Anthropogenic changes to land cover (LCC) remain common, but continuing land scarcity promotes the widespread intensification of land management changes (LMC) to better satisfy societal demand for food, fibre, fuel and shelter. The biophysical effects of LCC on surface climate are largely understood, particularly for the boreal and tropical zones, but fewer studies have investigated the biophysical consequences of LMC; that is, anthropogenic modification without a change in land cover type. Harmonized analysis of ground measurements and remote sensing observations of both LCC and LMC revealed that, in the temperate zone, potential surface cooling from increased albedo is typically offset by warming from decreased sensible heat fluxes, with the net effect being a warming of the surface. Temperature changes from LMC and LCC were of the same magnitude, and averaged 2 K at the vegetation surface and were estimated at 1.7 K in the planetary boundary layer. Given the spatial extent of land management (42–58% of the land surface) this calls for increasing the efforts to integrate land management in Earth System Science to better take into account the human impact on the climate.

Abstract:This paper uses remote sensing data from 1989 to 2000 to examine the impacts of price liberalization, land tenure, and biophysical characteristics on farmland abandonment in the border region of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Using regression analysis and matching estimators, we find that differences in biophysical characteristics, rather than in tenure systems, best explain the variation in abandonment rates within Poland. The difference in abandonment rates between Poland and Slovakia partially results from differences in land reform strategy, and abandonment in Ukraine takes a unique trajectory because of the incompleteness of the land reform and the lack of outside opportunities for residents. (JEL Q15, R14)

Grasslands are important for global biodiversity, food security, and climate change analyses, which makes mapping and monitoring of vegetation changes in grasslands necessary to better understand, sustainably manage, and protect these ecosystems. However, grassland vegetation monitoring at spatial and temporal resolution relevant to land management (e.g., ca. 30-m, and at least annually over long time periods) is challenging due to complex spatio-temporal pattern of changes and often limited data availability. Here we assess both short- and long-term changes in grassland vegetation cover from 1987 to 2019 across the Caucasus ecoregion at 30-m resolution based on Cumulative Endmember Fractions (i.e., annual sums of monthly ground cover fractions) derived from the full Landsat record, and temporal segmentation with LandTrendr. Our approach combines the benefits of physically-based analyses, missing data prediction, annual aggregations, and adaptive identification of changes in the time-series. We analyzed changes in vegetation fraction cover to infer the location, timing, and magnitude of vegetation change episodes of any length, quantified shifts among all ground cover fractions (i.e., green vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, soil, and shade), and identified change pathways (i.e., green vegetation loss, desiccation, dry vegetation loss, revegetation green fraction, greening, or revegetation dry fraction). We found widespread long-term positive changes in grassland vegetation (32.7% of grasslands), especially in the early 2000s, but negative changes pathways were most common before the year 2000. We found little association between changes in green vegetation and meteorological conditions, and varied relationships with livestock populations. However, we also found strong spatial heterogeneity in vegetation dynamics among neighboring fields and pastures, demonstrating capability of our approach for grassland management at local levels. Our results provide a detailed assessment of grassland vegetation change in the Caucasus Ecoregion, and present an approach to map changes in grasslands even where availability of Landsat data is limited.

The article discusses the importance of the identification, protection and preservation of reindeer migratory routes and calving grounds in the Yamal, Tazovsky and Gydansky peninsulas in Western Siberia. Wild reindeer thrived in the area, but with the deposits of natural gas and gas fields, its herds started to collapse, attributed to factors including the poaching and destruction of reindeer pastures, and the fragmentation of reindeer herd ranges and interrupted traditional migration routes.