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Exploring virtual land trade (VLT) embodied in the global agricultural trade enables us to uncover potential risks to economy, environment, and food security within the trade structure. Using the bilateral trade data for the periods of 1988–1990, 1998–2000, 2008–2010, and 2018–2020, we created halfcircle diagrams depicting how virtual land of cereals is traded between countries of different income levels. The diagrams show that the global trend of virtual land in cereal products was being exported from high-income to low-income countries. Initially, a few wealthy countries dominated exports, and in later periods, middle-income countries joined major exporters. There has been a significant increase in the number of countries participating in VLT. Halfcircle diagrams are a useful tool for visualizing overall trends of VLT in relation to a potential driver.

Climate change is altering the timing and magnitude of snowmelt, which may either directly or indirectly via global trade affect agriculture and livelihoods dependent on snowmelt. Here, we integrate subannual irrigation and snowmelt dynamics and a model of international trade to assess the global redistribution of snowmelt dependencies and risks under climate change. We estimate that 16% of snowmelt used for irrigation is for agricultural products traded globally, of which over 70% is from five countries. Globally, we observe a prodigious snowmelt dependence and risk diffusion, with particularly evident importing of products at risk in western Europe. In Germany and the UK, local fraction of surface-water-irrigated agriculture supply exposed to snowmelt risks could increase from negligible to 16% and 10%, respectively, under a 2 °C warming. Our results reveal the trade-exposure of agricultural supplies, highlighting regions and crops whose consumption may be vulnerable to changing snowmelt even if their domestic production is not.

ABSTRACTRural migration is an integral component of land systems, altering land management both at the origin and destination of migration in regions of Europe and North America. We examine population moving in and out of rural areas in Ohio, U.S.A, between 2008 and 2016 and examine spatiotemporal patterns in land cover. Among families changing residential location, one-third of all household moving events are migration from or to rural areas. A PCA ordination and cluster analysis of rural migration revealed qualitatively distinct patterns. Urban peripheries grew due to in-migration from metro suburban areas, while agricultural and forested areas reflect intra-rural and micropolitan migration. Forested communities have lost population to other rural areas, and rural poverty pockets have gained low-income families from both rural and metro urban areas. Spatial analysis of rural migration patterns and associations with land use helps develop targeted land management strategies and reveals under-represented dynamics in prior studies.

ABSTRACTMaintaining forest cover and function given large-scale changes in population distribution, infrastructure, and regional economies represents a formidable societal challenge. Land architecture assumes landscape structures are collective outcomes of land-use decision-making, including how individual decisions about forest management reflect local, regional, and global phenomena. Yet, gaps in systematic understanding of these cross-scale interactions persist. We argue that current research on enduring and emerging forest policy issues, including parcelization and multifunctionality, neglects how changing landscape conditions mediate land-use changes. We highlight potential mechanisms by which regional context enables or constrains decisions on private forest landholdings in the northeastern United States, examining relationships between land use and land management of private forest landholdings and landscape-level dynamics such as exurban development, management of public lands, tourism, employment and commuting, infrastructure, and extraction. We describe an expanded set of regional landscape structures and social systems that shape and are shaped by land-use decision-making.

This study examines the links between economic change and environmental recovery. We first review the influential framework known as Forest Transition Theory (FTT), which uses the experience of the North to posit a causal linkage between economic growth and forest regrowth. We then lay out problems with this theory and offer an alternative. Our central argument is that FTT provides faulty explanations of forest regrowth because it treats economic development as a characteristic of places. Drawing from geographical scholarship that sees economic development as occurring through dynamic relationships among places, we contend instead that forest regrowth in the North is due not to a universal process of economic development, but rather reflects the ability of wealthy regions to import forest and agricultural products, thereby exporting environmental impact. Economic growth, therefore, cannot be prescribed as a universal catalyst for environmental recovery because any such recovery relies on degradation elsewhere. Future research on forest regrowth should investigate multiple environment–economy relationships that both createand depend ondifferences among places.