News

Land degradation threatens livelihoods with the potential to displace vulnerable groups, yet its impacts on migration are poorly understood as environmental migration research mainly focuses on the impacts of climate change on migration. A new comment in Nature Sustainability argues that addressing this gap is vital as land degradation poses risks for sustainability.

A Special Issue of IOPscience Environmental Research: Food System seeks articles that address "how" exactly transformations to more sustainable land systems can be achieved. There is a greater need to better understand how competing visions for the land can be reconciled and to explore the full range of solution space for sustainability. This also implies going beyond individual policy approaches to envisioning and executing transformations in the structural factors shaping land systems including, for example, colonial legacies, capitalist and economic growth oriented economic systems, consumptive cultures, and unjust or undemocratic political systems. Deadline: 1 May 2024

The Early-Career Fellowship (ECF) is a pilot program launched in 2022, which aims to implement the development concept of innovation, coordination, green, openness, and sharing, and help promote the achievement of sustainable development goals. Deadline: 31 October 2023

This MRD Talk brought together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to explore how best to set up monitoring systems and share the information generated to enable effective policies and action for sustainable futures in mountains.

A new paper in Land Use Policy looked at 94 papers about different types of conflicts (land-use, socio-economic, ethnic, and human-wildlife conflicts) in urban peripheries in Europe.

A new paper in PNAS demonstrates that without explicit consideration of distributional outcomes, land-use interventions can systematically generate greater inequalities with important consequences for livelihoods and development.

A new paper in Ambio contributes to debates on the fate of small-scale farmers, and calls for contextualized decisions.

A new book highlights the urgent need to move from desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) risk management to resilience. The aim is to provide new insight on the issues of DLDD and stir policy guide on vulnerability reduction and building adaptive capacities so as to achieve sustainable development and identify pathways to a land degradation neutral world.

On 28 June the GLP Socio-Ecological Land Systems in Latin America Working Group and the GLP Nodal Office for Latin America presented the newly-created Network of Andean Social-Ecological Observatories (funded by the ESA-Future Earth Joint Program), that integrates the social-ecological monitoring efforts of the region. The webinar recording and presenters' slides are now available.

Future Earth is inviting contributions to UNEP's "Perspectives" publication 2023-24. Issues of "Perspectives" are usually 8-10 pages long, including pictures and graphs, and are written in a style that is plain and easy to understand. They are widely distributed by UNEP via the website, social media, and emails.

A new paper in Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy addresses a gap by performing a model validation of the LUISA Territorial Modelling Platform, a spatial model jointly simulating population and land use at a fine resolution (100 m) in the European Union and United Kingdom.

Land-use policies must be tailored to land-use systems to be effective. GLP members explore how archetype analysis can support tailoring of land-use policies to land system properties.

A new review in the Annual Review of Resource Economics argues that ecosystem restoration should be among our main scientific endeavors. It fills a critical gap in the existing literature by providing a theory-informed understanding of the findings emerging from this highly policy-relevant strand of resource economics.

A new Perspective in Science underscores evolving rural abandonment and depopulation and calls for socioecological studies to evaluate and develop approaches beneficial both for biodiversity and rural livelihoods.

Articles focus on an interactive mudflow database for risk reduction in Kazakhstan, economic benefits of a social innovation in a Swiss Alpine valley, the need to find a common language about empty houses in Bhutan, the effects of land use on local climate in Ecuador, an agenda for a people-centered energy transition in mountains, ICIMOD’s new strategy, the appropriateness of the word “alpine,” and the life of Pauline Ives, editor of MRD from 1981 to 1999.

A new article in Journal of Land Use Science provides approaches for facilitating researchers to get an enhanced understanding of multi-scale land change processes, as well as supporting land governance in scaling up the knowledge and solutions generated by LSS research.

On 25 April 2023, the journal Mountain Research and Development held their third MRD Talk on how learnings from science and practice show how social innovations can contribute to local mountain economies. Key insights from and a recording of the talk are now available.

A new book provides a comprehensive and holistic approach to study the peri-urban dynamics at small spatial units. It includes in-depth discussions on changes in population, development and land in the peri-urban region and illustrates a framework to integrate spatial data with census data to study micro-level peri-urban change.

A new paper in World Development by members of the GLP Working Group on Remittance Dynamics and Land Change seeks to understand the specific roles remittances play in land system changes to help clarify the multiple processes associated with migration and their independent and interactive effects.

A new article in Nature found that the cropland expansion in PAs accelerated dramatically from 2000 to 2019, compared with that of global croplands. Notably, some PAs with the highest conservation levels failed to prevent cropland expansion.

Abstracts invited for a session at the XVI Congreso Nacional de la AEET: “La Ecología en una biosfera humanizada”, which will take place from 16-20 October 2023 at Universidad de Almería (UAL), Almería, Spain. Deadline: 17 April 2023

A new paper in Environmental Research evaluates whether district-level greenness exposure is associated with a reduced risk of COVID-19 deaths in India.

In a webinar on 21 February 2023, authors of The Land Gap Report joined The Global Land Programme (GLP) and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) to share their findings that countries’ climate pledges rely on unrealistic amounts of land-based carbon removal.

Members of the joint GLP/AIMES BeModeLS group invite submissions for a session of the 2023 European Conference on Ecological Modelling that deal with the conceptualisation and modelling of social-ecological interactions, strategies for overcoming lack of data or knowledge including through innovative collection methods, and the use of models to support sustainability transformations. Deadline: 1 April 2023

A new paper in Landscape Ecology examined how studying the Covid-19 pandemic's severe impacts on land users and landscapes around the world allow a better understanding of how global shocks, cascading disruptions, and reconnections influence contemporary land systems. The paper grew out of a collaboration between multiple GLP Working Groups.

The GLP working group Telecoupling Towards Sustainable Transformation held a webinar on 19 January 2023 to launch the second phase of the group. Watch the recording to learn more about what was discussed and next steps.

A session on the impacts of armed conflicts on landscapes has been opened as part of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) World Congress 10-15 July 2023 in Nairobi, Kenya. Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2023.

A new article in Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment finds significant impacts of melting snow and glaciers in the region. Based on the study, it is recommended to enhance institutional capacity in the country to face different environmental hazards, including early warning systems on the local scale. 

The GLP is currently seeking to nominate two to three new SSC members, starting June 2023. The continuing success of GLP relies on the input of these people. In seeking nominations, we are looking for scientific excellence and a high level of commitment to actualizing GLP goals and activities. Deadline: 1 April 2023

The editors of a new special issue of Land invite papers that aim to address the sustainability challenges of land degradation and showcase innovative and promising practices and success stories from across the world for restoring degraded lands to attain global sustainability by 2030. Deadline: 5 June 2023

A new paper in Environmental Research Letters uses publicly-available remote-sensing and supply chain data for Côte d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer, to quantify cocoa-driven deforestation and trace 2019 cocoa exports and the associated deforestation from their department of origin, via trading companies, to international markets. 

A new article in Global Environmental Change identifies factors determining local stickiness in Brazil's soy supply chain.

The Global Land Programme (GLP) IPO moved to its new home at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences in the United States on 1 February 2023. This transition was made possible by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in support of the land science community as a key part of international global change research infrastructure.

A new article in Land Use Policy looks at how future agricultural land uses can counteract Blue and Green Infrastructure Networks.

A new article in Regional Environmental Change draws on insights from politics of scale to present a framework for analysing the multiple environmentalities of environmental governance in protected areas  focusing on the construction of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park in Lao PDR.

In his project LAND-POLICY, David Johannes Wuepper wants to record government measures worldwide to counteract land degradation, and analyze their respective effectiveness.

Global Sustainability recently published an overview of "Ten new insights in climate science 2022" including a chapter by the Global Land Programme on how sustainable land use can make a difference in meeting climate targets.

GLP Member Paul West is one of four world-class researchers joining Project Drawdown as inaugural members of the nonprofit organization’s new science team.

A new article in Nature Climate Change integrates subannual irrigation and snowmelt dynamics and a model of international trade to assess the global redistribution of snowmelt dependencies and risks under climate change.

A new article in Sustainability investigates the extent and impact of oil spills on different land use types, protected areas, and species in the Niger Delta of Nigeria by using vegetation indices and remote sensing.

A new article in Nature Communications shows eliminating deforestation from the supply chains of all firms exporting Brazilian soy to the EU or China from 2011-2016 could have reduced net global deforestation by 2% and Brazilian deforestation by 9%. 

A new piece in Environmental Research Letters finds that countries with high forest cover and low deforestation (HFLD) are unlikely to be compensated fairly if REDD+ initiatives fail to conserve existing forests and to incentivize low deforestation rates.

The leads of the Land product validation (LPV) subgroup of the NASA CEOS Working Group on Calibration and Validation (WGCV) are looking for leads and contributors for the different chapters and sub-chapters of the next global Land Cover and Land Cover Change Validation protocol.

A new report co-sponsored by the IPCC, UNESCO and ICOMOS highlights the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ knowledge systems and their full and equitable inclusion within policy processes as a means to transform climate governance.

A new perspective in Communications Earth & Environment advocates a concept of future pathways tailored to the characteristics of agricultural land systems and relate these to targeted farming approaches using agroecological principles.

Submissions are now welcome for a special issue of Land.Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 April 2023

A new study published in Science finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.

ISC Fellows are eminent scientists, engineers and thought leaders from across the spectrum of science and society. The Fellowship is the highest honour that can be conferred on an individual by the International Science Council and recognizes outstanding contributions to the promotion of science as a global public good. Deadline: 7 October

To be eligible, projects must involve communities at the grassroots level and deliver practical action that is founded on science. Deadline: 31 October

A new article in Agronomy for Sustainable Development suggests that highly specialized, intensive farms face higher vulnerability to shocks that affect regional to global supply chains. 

We are pleased to announce the Call for Panel for the XIX Biennial IASC Conference 2023. The IASC has been shaping the debate on alternative development pathways by way of putting the commons center stage. In times of profound crises, we have seen states being caught up in emergency mode. This unfolds, among others, in a tendency to respond within national borders, and it has brought the importance of building genuine resilience that leaves no one behind. New deadline: 3 October 2022

A new paper in Global Environmental Change explores how indigenous territories and protected areas in Bolivia reduce deforestation, but suffer "spillovers" with an increase in deforestation around the areas.

On June 30, 2022, the GLP Co-production Working Group hosted its second networking event, which featured a presentation by Dr. Amare Bantider from the Water and Land Resource Centre (WLRC) in Ethiopia. He shared his perspective on the topics and experiences related to co-production through the learning watershed approach in Ethiopia.

The purpose of the David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship is to create opportunities for leading conservation scientists to strengthen their skills through two years of applied post-doctoral research, supplemented by training programs, peer networking, and field learning experiences. Application deadline: 16 September 2022

This Frontiers Research Topic welcomes those engaged in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in soil and water management for dryland areas. Theoretical, experimental, modeling, and social studies are welcomed. Abstract submission deadline: 5 August 2022

A new article in Global Environmental Change maps the megatrends of climate, demography, value system and environmental regulation to gain foresight on the future of European agriculture. This is a product of the SIPATH project, a collaboration between the IVM (Amsterdam), WSL and Agroscope (Zürich).

A new article in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation compares and summarizes the methodological progresses and shortcomings of remote sensing of swidden agriculture, followed by providing several perspectives on near-future research directions. 

This initiative is endorsed by the Global Research Council, given the collective agreement on the importance of sustainability for our collective future. With this call the GRC is committed to taking concrete steps towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through innovative research and actions. Deadline for Concept Note submission: 25 August 2022

The International Science Council (ISC) and the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) are looking for experts to review the second-order draft of the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report. Deadline for nominating experts: 20 July 2022

The Belmont Forum is pleased to announce the launch of a collaborative research networking call on the theme: Integrated Approaches to Human Migration/Mobility in an Era of Rapid Global Change. They solicit proposals that contribute to an integrated systems approach to accurately characterize migration and mobility and its intersection with Global Change, both closely related and intersecting phenomena. Deadline: 29 July 2022

The Velux Foundation invites proposals that will further the foundation's wish to support solution-oriented research based on an interaction between science and practitioners. Deadline: 19 September 2022

A new article in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change hypothesized that peri-urban forest transitions are driven by processes associated with urban-based economies and functioning, which define spatial characteristics of new forests.

A new article in Science Advances finds that, unless policymakers take steps to reduce recultivation or provide incentives for regeneration, abandonment will remain a missed opportunity to reduce biodiversity loss and climate change.

The journal Land is currently running a Special Issue entitled “Modelling Land Use in Challenging Terrains”. The submission deadline is 13 November 2022.

The GLP IPO has welcomed a new staff member, who will be assisting with our Working Groups, events, and more.

A new article in Environmental Research Letters proposes a data-driven methodological routine based on multivariate statistical analysis to identify the most relevant indicators for mapping and characterizing SES archetypes in a particular region.

A recent paper in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability highlights the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary processes. 

In this paper, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors develop an innovative framework to identify and evaluate leverage points along land-use trajectories that account for path dependency. They apply this to the biodiversity hotspot north-eastern Madagascar, where they identify opportunities for sustainable land-use in fallow-derived vanilla agroforestry.

Papers that analyze the potential governance implications of blockchain innovations within agriculture and propose suggestions for taking power relations into account are also welcomed. Deadline: 9 April 2022

This free online course gives you an introduction to the STEPS Centre’s core conceptual approach, the Pathways Approach to sustainability.

A new paper in Environmental Research Letters drawing on the insights from two international workshops on archetype analysis and on broader literature to propose a framework that identifies and describes six dimensions of validity. 

A new paper in AMBIO presents a systematic review of 126 cases reporting socioeconomic impacts of agricultural changes in Southeast Asia. Findings are analyzed in relation to different land governance regimes, different land use changes, and in terms of trade-offs and synergies between different outcomes.

The organizers of this workshop invite all GLP Members to submit contributions and attend this workshop in Germany 18-20 May 2022 or remotely. Deadline for submissions is 23 March 2022, and the deadline to register is 4 May 2022. 

The Voices for Science program provides scientists interested in science communications and outreach with specialized training to hone their skills. Throughout the twelve-month program, participants work directly with AGU staff to conduct regular outreach activities with a variety of audiences in their local communities. Applications for the 2022-2023 cohort are open until 1 February 2022.

A new paper in Biological Conservation analyzes over 250 papers on human and climatic impacts on Ecuadorian biodiversity and suggests areas for further research.

Diana Sietz has been selected to be a lead author of the thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health (Nexus assessment) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

In a new paper in Ambio, the authors use firm- and actor-level interview and spatial data from transnational agriculture and forestry investments in Southern and Eastern Africa to distinguish four types of locations preferred by investors with varied skillsets and market reach (i.e., track record), across gradients of resource frontiers and agglomeration economies. They find that investors with extensive track records are more likely to expand the land use frontier, but likely to better survive the high transaction costs of the pre-commercial frontier, and point to the risks of promoting overly simplistic narratives.

You are invited to contribute to an upcoming Special Issue of the Earth System Governance journal on "The Governance of Biodiversity Recovery: From Global Targets to Sectoral Action". Deadline for abstracts: 13 March 2022

On January 19 we held a webinar on new research published in 2021 (PNAS and Annual Review of Environment and Resources) on how human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate. Watch the event recording and download the presenters' slides.

The GLP YouTube channel has grown over the past few years and now houses more than 75 videos on diverse land systems science topics. Want to know when new videos are available? Subscribe to the channel and be notified automatically!

A new paper in PNAS demonstrates an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 years across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km²).  The transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe.

A new paper in One Earth brings together studies across different sustainability dimensions, and investigates how global agricultural trade flows have affected land systems and resulting impacts on food and nutrient availability, natural habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem carbon storage.

Biodiversa+, the European Biodiversity Partnership, is pleased to announce that its 2021-2022 joint Call for Transnational Research Proposals on “Supporting biodiversity and ecosystem protection across land and sea” is now open. Deadline for pre-proposals: 30 November

A new article in Ambio looks at new patterns of reforestation through counterurbanization and looks at how this pathway could have a growing global effect.

A new paper in Global Environmental Change grew out of meeting sessions at the last GLP Open Science Meeting.

A new paper in Landscape and Urban Planning shows how integrating two approaches provides spatial templates for targeting policy responses related to the sustainable intensification of agricultural systems, the disappearance of traditional cropping systems and abandonment of rural lands, or the reconnection of urban population with the local environment, among others.

The GLP is currently seeking to nominate two to three new SSC members, starting December 1, 2021. The continuing success of GLP relies on the input of these people. In seeking nominations, we are looking for scientific excellence and a high level of commitment to actualizing GLP goals and activities. Deadline: 1 November 2021

This special issue of Land invites contributions exploring carbon consequences of urbanization, both land transformations of precursor systems and carbon shifts within those urban ecosystems. From a land systems science perspective, the land-climate interactions related to the consequences of land-use/land-cover change connected to urbanization processes on carbon pools are of interest. Deadline: 31 March 2022

The webinar recording for the GLP Integration of Rural and Urban Land Systems Working Group's third Young Speakers Series webinar is now available.

A new editorial capping the Special Feature "Archetype Analysis in Sustainability Research” in Ecology and Society takes stock of successful examples of archetype analysis, reflects on opportunities and pitfalls in applying archetype analysis and opens new avenues for a second generation of archetype analysis. Co-editors are the GLP Archetype Analysis Working Group Coordinators.

This call for funding from the Volkswagen Foundation is part of a broader international funding framework entitled "Global Issues – Integrating Different Perspectives", which aims to enable international research collaboration and to generate new insights on understudied issues of global relevance. The call intends to strengthen both inter- and transdisciplinary approaches as well as international cooperation on issues of human-environmental interactions. Deadline: 4 November

Based on their analysis of the complex and interacting drivers of forest change in the Himalayas, the authors highlight five thematic focus areas to curtail forest loss and promote recovery in this article in Global Environmental Change.

The authors conclude that the narrow focus on specific ES categories strongly limits understanding of SF in shifting cultivation areas and that it is more relevant to compare SFs with other agricultural systems rather than with old-growth forests.

SSC Member Rachael Garrett has joined the VSS Academic Advisory Council, which gathers an international and multi-disciplinary mix of academic experts involved in research on voluntary sustainability standards. 

The webinar recording and presentations for the GLP Social-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America (LASELS) Working Group's third webinar are now available.

The new Open Up Guide on Land Governance is a resource  aimed to be used by governments from developing countries to collect and release land-related data to improve data quality, availability, accessibility and use for improved citizen engagement, decision making and innovation. 

This study published in the Journal of Land Use Science demonstrates the advantage of deriving latent factors to identify land-use transformations based on a questionnaire sent to 1,600 farmland owners and managers on the fringes of Adelaide, South Australia, to elicit information on internal and external factors driving their land-use decisions. 

A new study in Landscape and Urban Planning draws recommendations on how to select suitable synthesis approaches to support different urban planning decisions.

This new study in Environmental Research Letters seeks to assist the decision-making process to build resilience to climate change in Ethiopia and other low-income countries with similar geophysical and socio-economic conditions.

The programme aims to grow mid-career African academics in the areas of collective leadership, team development, engagement, and collaboration, with the intention of enabling them to solve the complex issues that face both Africa and the global community.  Deadline: 31 July.

The LANDac Annual International Conference offers a podium for knowledge exchange between researchers, practitioners and private sector representatives interested in land governance for equitable and sustainable development. The LANDac Annual International Conference 2021 will be held 30 June - 2 July in an online format.

A new article in Landscape Ecology finds that a land systems classification including essential aspects of landscape and land management into a consistent classification can improve upon traditional land cover maps in large-scale biodiversity assessment.

The webinar recording and presentations for the GLP Integration of Rural and Urban Land Systems Working Group's second Young Speakers Series webinar are now available.

The webinar recording and presentations for the GLP Integration of Rural and Urban Land Systems Working Group's first Young Speakers Series webinar are now available.

The authors used high-resolution satellite and census data from India, the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, to quantify the impacts of groundwater depletion on cropping intensity, a crucial driver of agricultural production. The results suggest that, given current depletion trends, cropping intensity in India may decrease by 20% nationwide and by 68% in groundwater-depleted regions.

The guest editors of the Journal of Land Use Science welcome expressions of interest for a special issue devoted to highlighting the excellent and cutting-edge scholarship of women and non-binary people in land science. Deadline for expressions of interest: 1 May.

For this article, the authors analysed national forest-related policy to determine if the elements of the ecosystem services concept or ecosystem services categories were represented in order to support regional and national forest and tree management and rural livelihoods in Bangladesh.

The Special Issue of Sustainability welcomes innovative research concerning governance mixes oriented towards a more sustainable development of peri-urban landscapes (PULs). Deadline: 31 October 2021

The application for these USD 30K is closing soon! Early career researchers from a variety of GLP-related fields are invited to apply. Deadline: 21 March

In honour of International Open Data Day, having taken place on March 6th, the Land Portal would like to invite you to submit your data story for a chance to win a prize and have it featured on their website.

€1.9 billion will be made available by the European Research Council (ERC) in 2021 to allow some 1,000 top researchers to pursue frontier research. As in previous years, most of the funding (66%) is earmarked for early- to mid-career scientists and scholars. The funding will also support jobs for an estimated 6,860 postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and other research staff employed in ERC-funded teams.

The Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) offers five Individual Fellowships (Junior/Senior) and one Tandem Fellowship (Junior/Senior) for three to five months each. Deadline: 31 March

A new article in Environmental Research Letters provides a systematic review of the conservation and livelihood outcomes of the mechanisms that companies use to implement their forest-focused supply chain policies (FSPs)—certifications, codes of conduct, and market exclusion mechanisms.

The integration of ecosystem service (ES) knowledge into decision-making processes is increasingly endorsed by various policies and initiatives, with spatial planning targeted as one of the most relevant fields. This paper aims to gather and critically analyse how ES science contributes to spatial planning practices. 

The Second Order Draft (SOD) of the Values Assessment of IPBES is now out for review by external experts, including governments. The first draft of the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) is also available for review.

The 4^th Research Workshop on Archetypes of Sustainable Development was held fully online from 3-5 February 2021. Responding to the open Call in September, more than 40 participants from 5 continents discussed current research and emerging frontiers of archetype analysis in sustainability research. In addition, a Call for Papers for the workshop's special issue is open until 30 June.

In this paper in One Earth the authors show that using deviations from a model of cropland extent in 1992 built on all available data improves models of recent (1992–2015) cropland expansion over and above using the best available existing data.

A new paper in the Journal of Environmental Management presents a protocol to operationalize the development of Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture – Eur-Agri-SSPs – to support IAAS. The proposed design of the storyline development process is based on six quality criteria: plausibility, vertical and horizontal consistency, salience, legitimacy, richness and creativity.

A new paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution looks at how we can manage the resources of our planet in such a way that we produce enough healthy food without destroying our life-support system. A comprehensive analytical framework is provided that accounts for multitrophic biodiversity-production processes; bridges disciplinary boundaries between agronomy, agroecology, economics, and conservation science; and elucidates the strong interactions of ecosystem functioning with food security and malnutrition. A helpful animation is also available.

A new article in World Development details some inclusiveness issues at the Matopiba frontier of soy expansion in Brazil, adding to the social and human rights dimensions of land-use change. 

In the second part of a two-paper series, the authors introduce SPAM2010 – the latest global spatially explicit datasets on agricultural production circa 2010 – and elaborate on the improvement of the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation Model) dataset family since 2000. SPAM2010 adds further methodological and data enhancements to the available crop downscaling modeling, which mainly include the update of base year, the extension of crop list, and the expansion of subnational administrative-unit coverage.

This paper examines land use patterns of rural households and the association with food production and income across three different zones of various forest proximity across a landscape gradient (remote, intermediate and on‐road) in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh. 

Chinwe Ifejika Speranza and Tobias Kuemmerle are receiving the renowned grant, which is worth up to 2 million euros and is awarded by the European Research Council to top researchers in Europe pursuing potentially ground-breaking projects in basic research.

Allowing space for multiple views means leaving no one’s view behind. It is proposed to map the multiple pathways of change to achieve responsible tenure governance in a causal framework using the concept of theories of change.

A new article in PNAS brings together detailed data on trade, agriculture, and logistics to produce a subnational map of the origin of Brazil’s exports of beef, offal, and live cattle. The work gives an unprecedented insight into the origin of food and impacts embedded in global supply chains.

In addressing the need for advancing our knowledge of land systems towards more practicable solutions, Michal Switalski and Adrienne Grêt-Regamey have published a paper in Sustainability Science on how to operationalise place for land system science. Based on an overview of place studies, place and place-making are presented as a conceptual model, which allows for expansion and substantiation when deployed to relevant land system research tasks. They close with a number of recommendations to be made for land system science when aiming at supporting sustainable transformation.

Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list this week with 27 GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.

Escaping from the current ‘Pandemic Era’ requires a radical revision of governmental, economic, and societal systems, warns a new IPBES report from 22 global experts, including SSC Member Unai Pascual.

A new article in Agricultural Systems looks at medium-scale farms, which are often considered to be either the "light" version of land grabbing or a much-needed model of innovation. The findings of this new study suggest that the qualities attached to medium-scale farms are not as clear-cut as they are often made out to be.

A new study published in Environments aims to better understand the state of research on protected areas and food security through a methodological lens.

An article by Diana Sietz and colleagues in Environmental Research Letters shows how the choice of the baseline period as a reference for assessing future changes can dramatically impact the key messages drawn from a basin-scale climate impact study. To address this problem, an algorithm was developed to identify flexible baseline periods for each simulation individually, which better represent the statistical properties of a given historical period.

A new paper from the SEOSAW project, a GLP Contributing Project, provides large-scale evidence that there are alternative states in tree species composition of tropical vegetation in Africa. This result is not only important for understanding the biogeography of the continent but also, to guide large-scaled tree planting and restoration efforts planned for the region. An article in ScienceDaily provides links back from the research to debates in the GLP community.

The GLP/AIMES working group on held its first webinar, featuring Peter Verburg and Elke Weber discussing whether the idea of large-scale behavioural modelling is realistic, in November. View a recording of the full webinar and download the presentations.

Laura Vang Rasmussen, Ole Mertz and colleagues have published an article in Nature showing a relatively high density of isolated trees in the region, which challenges prevailing narratives about dryland desertification. Even the desert shows a surprisingly high tree density. Their assessment suggests a way to monitor trees outside of forests globally, and to explore their role in mitigating degradation, climate change and poverty.

The Cambridge University Press Transformations Collection of Global Sustainability aims to bring together theoretical and practical knowledge from systematic research in transformations towards sustainability. Deadline to submit: 31 March 2021.

A revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet's past and its future. Read a new article in Aeon that expands on Lucas Stephens and Erle Ellis' 2019 paper in Science on the results of their ArchaeoGLOBE Project.

SSC Co-Chair Navin Ramankutty has been awarded the prestigious Wihuri International Prize in recognition of his long-standing work on sustainable global food systems.

GLP members are working on a study titled “Policy making and spatial planning for reducing ecosystem services trade-offs in peri-urban landscapes”. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 9 October.

WRI's previous blog, Regenerative Agriculture: Good for Soil Health, but Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change, generated a spirited discussion. In this post, they provide further elaboration on their conclusions.

The first publication of the SIPATH project, a GLP Contributing Project, is now available in Advances in Ecological Research. The framework presented in it goes beyond earlier frameworks by considering multiple dimensions of intensity and sustainability, drawing from both natural and social science theories. 

The Agropolis Fondation - Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize for Agriculture and Food was created in 2009 by Agropolis Fondation as a tribute to Professor Louis Malassis, founder of Agropolis. Every two years, three awards are presented in his name: Renowned Scientist; Young Scientific Talent; Outstanding Career for Agricultural Development. Deadline 11 January.

LTER synthesis working groups organized through the LTER Network Office (LNO) are intended to support collaboration on many types of questions informed by the data produced at LTER sites. In the 2020 competition, the LNO expects to award 2-4 synthesis working groups at a funding level of up to $55,000 per year for up to two years. Proposals are due at 14 October.

A new call for submissions to the Journal of Land Use Science is seeking original submissions, which can range from full-length research articles to short communications. Authors are also welcome to serve as guest editors, and organize a group of papers toward a special issue or section.

A new comment in Nature encourages leaders to enhance and empower the networks that have emerged in India's slums, Brazil's favelas and Africa's marketplaces in response to the pandemic.

The Natural Enviornment Research Council (NERC) in the UK has launched its Strategic Capital Call 2020, which will fund strategic equipment and development of built infrastructure that creates a new research capability. Deadline for full proposals: 20 October 2020

National Geographic seeks journalists, photographers, filmmakers, cartographers, data visualizers, and socially-connected storytellers who can show us what we might lose if these biomes are not protected and highlight potential solutions that have the power to create real, sustainable improvements. Deadline: 21 October 2020

The Royal Society Te Apārangi has opened the July 2020 Call for Catalyst: Seeding, which facilitates new small and medium pre-research strategic partnerships between New Zealand and other countries that cannot be supported through other means, and with a view to developing full collaborations that could be supported through Catalyst: Strategic over time. Deadline: 15 October 2020

The awards provide up to £25,000 over one year to support collaborations between developing countries and the UK and to hold networking events aimed at addressing global challenges. Round 7 is now open for applications. Deadline: 10 September 2020.

This event from early August explored two recent media stories raising questions about the grand park development plan, which has the support of several powerful U.S. senators.

A new special issue of the Journal of Land Use Science illustrates the multi-dimensionality of land use change at Latin American frontiers by exploring transdisciplinary cross-fertilization. 

The Group on Earth Observation Land Degradation Neutrality have launched a technology innovation competition for the development of a software to support the integration of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) into land-use planning at different levels, including national, regional and local. Proposals are due 31 August 2020.

A new book provides insights into the interrelation of population, land use/cover and environmental conditions for seven metro cities in India.

Papers sought for a special issue of Agriculture. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2020.

The GLP Taipei Nodal Office held a three-day free online workshop in July on how to measure error and temporal change for a variety of applications, in particular for GIS-based land change simulation. The presenter, Prof. Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr., showed how to avoid common mistakes and to use enlightening techniques such as the Total Operating Characteristic and Difference Components. Recordings and slides of the sessions are available.

Robert Heilmayr, Cristian Echeverría and Eric F. Lambin have a paper in Nature Sustainability showing that poorly designed payments for afforestation can undermine carbon benefits, and can have negative impacts on biodiversity.

The goal of this CRA is to provide a science base for achieving sustainability goals. The CRA will support 1-2 years of collaborative research networking activities that focus on integrated qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop Earth-system-based transformation pathways for sustainable development.

The National Geographic Society and Microsoft’s AI for Earth program are partnering to support novel projects that create and deploy AI tools to improve the way we monitor, model, understand, and ultimately manage Earth’s natural resources for a more sustainable future. Deadline for proposals is 21 October 2020.

The goal of this Collaborative Research Action is to produce the necessary knowledge and propose solutions to maintain well-functioning soils and groundwater systems in the Critical Zone, or rehabilitate them where degraded. Proposals close 24 August 2020.

The Young Refugee and Displaced Scientists programme is aimed at supporting talented young scientists of the age of 40 and below who are refugees or displaced and have an excellent track record of publications. TWAS-UNESCO and the Islamic Development Bank are seeking nominations for the Refugee and Displaced Young Scientists Programme. The deadline for receiving applications is 30 July 2020.

The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS) has launched a call for applications to fund new working groups to produce rapid publications in relation to COVID-19. Applications must take an innovative, unconventional approach to understanding and addressing the challenges posed by COVID-19 and society’s response to it. Deadline to apply is 31 July 2020.

Applications are invited for the sixth cohort of Affiliates of the African Academy of Sciences. Call closes 24 July 2020.

This S4D4C European Science Diplomacy Online Course is completely free of charge for you. The launching of the platform has been funded within the EU project S4D4C by the European Commission. The sucessful completion of the course is awarded by an offical certificate. Our online course offers you eight modules, in which six modules (2-7) include learning content.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is organising a virtual workshop series on “Strengthening and connecting science for policy eco-systems in Europe” between September 2020 and May 2021. The deadline to register for the September and October sessions is 7 August 2020.

A group of GLP Members published this piece in the Journal of Land Use Science, highlighting the potential of incorporating elements of environmental justice scholarship into the evolving telecoupling framework that focuses on distant interactions in land systems.

SSC Member Ricardo Grau and colleagues published an article in Elementa about the complexity of outcomes resulting from livestock diminishing density, and provide a framework to understand and optimize processes of large herbivore rewilding according to different social-ecological contexts.

SSC Member Gete Zeleke was featured recently in an EcoAgricultural Partners blog post. The piece covers his background, current work with 'landscape learning' at a pilot site, and motivations for his work.

Several GLP Members published an article in Global Environmental Change mapping carbon emissions embodied in Brazil's soy exports.

Mangroves are one of the world's most threatened ecosystems, and Myanmar is regarded as the current mangrove deforestation hotspot globally. This study by GLP Member Jose Don T De Alban demonstrates the importance of multi-sensor satellite data for national-level mangrove change assessments, along with gross land cover transition analyses to assess landscape dynamics as well as prioritise threats and interventions in an effort to develop holistic strategies that aim to conserve important habitats.

The European Commission announces the co-funding of regional, national and international programmes (COFUND), which provides organisations with additional financial support for their own researcher training and career development programmes. The call for proposals for 2020 is now open.

Mobility Grants are especially useful for emerging researchers (Postdocs and PhD students) for the integration of the next generation of scientists in international collaboration, helping to build new partnerships through personal contacts, mutual trust, and to make cooperation more sustainable. Grants up to CHF 7,000 will be awarded. Deadline to apply is 25 May 2020.

GLP Members Mairon Bastos Lima and Martin Persson published an in-depth case study in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change of the Cerrado Working Group, a multi-stakeholder initiative led by civil society and the soy agribusiness to address land use change in that savanna landscape in Brazil. The findings suggest that a sustainable development agenda for the Cerrado has been substantially narrowed to become mostly one of conversion-free soy supply, serving more the interests of that agroindustry and its consumers than those of the landscape's most vulnerable stakeholders, such as local communities.

A Special Issue in the journal Geosciences  aims to present cutting-edge research that can help understand feedbacks between humans and the environment by using approaches that integrate human and environmental systems, including modeling, observational, theoretical, and applied sciences at local to global scales. The Guest Editor is GLP Member Alan Di Vittorio. Deadline for manuscript submissions 31 August 2020.

ETH Zurich is making the first MOOC to teach Landscape Ecology available until September as a free self-paced online course.

The Swiss Network for Transdisciplinarity Research (td-net) has developed a toolbox with methods and tools for co-producing knowledge. The methods and tools intend to help shape collaboration between experts and stakeholders from science and practice in systematic and traceable ways.

GLP Member Amrita Sen and GLP Fellow Harini Nagendra published in the Journal of Land Use Science, discussing the growing body of literature that examines environmental placemaking and arguing that this literature contributes significant explanatory power to land change science, by helping understand the motivations that act as precursors to shape both proximate drivers of land change, and responses to them.

A new paper by 7 GLP members assesses progress towards zero deforestation commitments in the Brazilian soy sector using state-of-the-art supply chain data.

GLP Fellow Erle Ellis published an op-ed with colleagues Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis in The New York Times that says focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion.

Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. The authors of a new paper in Nature Sustainability, including GLP Fellow Harini Nagendra and Executive Officer Ariane de Bremond, and several leaders and coordinators of Future Earth's global research projects (GRPs), propose a set of four general principles that underlie high quality knowledge co-production for sustainability research. Using these principles, they offer practical guidance on how to engage in meaningful co-productive practices, and how to evaluate their quality and success.

A December article in the journal Science distills for the scientific community the most salient and novel findings, messages and policy options of the Global Assessment Report, which was approved by representatives of the 132 member Governments of IPBES in May last year. It emphasizes five priority interventions ("levers") and eight leverage points for action to address these indirect drivers of social and economic systems, where they can make the greatest difference. Several GLP Fellows, SSC Members and GLP members were authors of the paper, which is open access.

The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg (Austria, close to Vienna) announces 5 Writing-Up Fellowships for late-stage PhD students working in inter and transdisciplinary sustainability science with a focus on theoretical dimensions (conceptual, methodological, and epistemological) of sustainability research. Deadline for initial selection is 30 January 2020.

After a fruitful discussion on Teaching Ecosystem Service at the 10th ESP Conference, Nodal Office Coordinator Marcin Spyra and colleagues are seeking to enrich the pool of answers and get wider responses by making a second round of the survey available. This survey will allow to analyze the state of the art on Teaching Ecosystem Service, so further steps can be identified.

GLP Member Katarzyna Ostapowicz is the guest editor of a special issue of Remote Sensing that is aiming to cover the most recent advances in techniques and algorithms to process remotely sensed information for ecology and conservation in the high-altitude and high-latitude regions. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2020.

The editors for a Special Issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X) entitled: “Land Change Modelling” have extended the deadline for responses to 12 December 2019.

A special issue of Sustainability has been announced, focusing on "Natural Resources Management and Conflicts in the Context of Sustainability Transformation". The call for papers is now open and the deadline for paper submissions is August 31, 2020.

One Earth – a new journal from Cell Press – publishes high-impact research that seeks to understand and address today’s environmental grand challenges. The inaugural issue focuses partly on land, and features pieces by many members of the GLP community. Check out Voices, Commentaries, Reflection, and Perspectives sections for more.

The newly-established Eastern Mediterranean Middle East – Climate and Atmosphere Research Centre (EMME-CARE) at the Cyprus Institute, the home of GLP's MENA Nodal Office, will devise adaptation strategies for climate change impacts with sound scientific basis, and involve stakeholders and decision makers.

Verra develops and manages standards that help countries, the private sector and civil society achieve their sustainable development and climate goals. 

Using publicly accessible registries of organic crop farmers, GLP Members Žiga Malek and Peter Verburg mapped the farmers' distribution globally and related it to local socio-economic, climatic, and soil characteristics in Agricultural Systems.

Applications are now open for the part-time DPhil and MSc in Sustainable Urban Development for October 2020 entry.

GABS makes $300,000 available to fund research that quantifies the benefits of satellite data when they are used to make decisions that improve socioeconomically meaningful outcomes for people and/or the environment. The consortium expects to make no more than three awards under GABS, each in the range of $100,000. Deadline for pre-proposals is December 5, 2019.

The GLP working group on telecoupling held its first webinar, which introduced the freely-available FABIO model, in September. View a recording of the full webinar, download a copy of the presentation, and more.

Former GLP Co-chair Peter Verburg and GLP Member Sandra Diaz have been chosen to serve on the Earth Commission, a group of 19 leading international experts who will identify risks and develop a coherent suite of scientific targets to protect Earth’s life support systems. The Earth Commission was announced by Future Earth on September 19th.

The International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology (www.icipe.org) is undertaking an online data collection to get a feel on the spread of the IPM technology to address the emerging fruit fly pest problem, the impact of training and capacity building in Africa.

GLP Members Žiga Malek, Jasper van Vliet, Emma van der Zanden and Peter Verburg just published in Environmental Research Letters. In the paper, they performed a review of local scale land use change studies, and present a typology of decision-making behind such changes. The paper is open access and includes a video abstract.

Measuring, analyzing, and mapping the societal risks and vulnerabilities of climate change has become part of the standard toolkit of climate risk and vulnerability assessments. This Special Issue focuses on the spatial assessment of climate risks and related vulnerabilities and the use of spatial data and analysis in field-based assessments. D9.eadline for submission is 30 November 201

The NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN has begun accepting submissions of scientific data related to human-environment interactions that are of high utility to the human dimensions research and applications communities.

GLP Member PC Abhilash welcomes submissions for a special issue on "Restoring Degraded Lands to Attain UN-SDGs" in accordance of the UN-International Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). 

GLP Members Yuanwei Qin, Jinwei Dong and Xiangming Xiao seek contributions for their AGU session on spatiotemporal changes of forest area, phenology, and biomass under human activities and climate change.

In this MOOC, participants learn theory, methods and tools to understand the landscapes we live in and to solve landscape-related environmental problems. GLP Fellow Harini Nagendra is among the faculty for the course, which is now in its second year and is being offered by ETH Zuerich.

We are pleased to announce that ALL articles from the GLP special issue are now available for free download until the end of 2019.

Older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests - particularly for carbon storage, timber production, and biodiversity - new University of Vermont research by GLM Members Laura Sonter and Gillian Galford and colleagues find.

A new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris, identifies changes in land and sea use as the most significant direct driver of changes in nature.

More than 600 scientists in the EU and 300 Brazilian Indigenous groups (represented by APIB and COIAB) have come together under a common goal: to urge the EU to make current trade negotiations with Brazil conditional on protecting human rights and the environment.

The development of sustainable regions requires an understanding of the land systems that supply the needs of nature and people. At the Open Science Meeting in Bern the Spanish land-use scientist and post-doc María Piquer-Rodríguez explains why the isolated view of disciplines does not correspond to the idea of sustainability – and why a holistic approach pays off.

This recent article in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (COSUST) was written by members of the GLP community for an upcoming GLP Special Issue in COSUST. The paper argues that normative positions are increasingly required of sustainability science and lays out principles that served to guide the themes and organization of the 4th GLP Open Science Meeting.

News on forest cover change in Latin America typically refer to the dramatic deforestation in the Amazon or the Chaco. However, many regions in the world are experiencing the opposite pattern of forest expansion due to agriculture abandonment or disintensification. Two new analyses led by the Instituto de Ecología Regional (IER, CONICET–UNT) of Argentina and the department of Biology of the University of Puerto Rico, document these trends in Latin America. Nodal Office Coordinator Ricardo Grau was a co-author on both.

The GLP working group on co-production held its fifth webinar, on ethical and contextual considerations in knowledge co-production and lessons learned from the webinar series, in March. View a recording of the full webinar, download copies of the presentations, and more.

Our approach of integrating complementary analytical frameworks to identify and understand land-cover regime shifts can help policymakers to preempt future regime shifts in Tanintharyi (Myanmar), and can be applied to the study of land change in other regions.

After a long process of research and consultation, CDE and MRLG are thrilled to announce the release of the book: “State of Land in the Mekong Region”. The first publication of its kind in the Mekong Region, it brings together key data and information on the current status of, and changes in, land resources, their social distribution, and the conditions of governance that shape them.

Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, published its annual Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list in November with twenty-two GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows on it.

Measuring, analyzing, and mapping the societal risks and vulnerabilities of climate change has become part of the standard toolkit of climate risk and vulnerability assessments. This Special Issuefocuses on the spatial assessment of climate risks and related vulnerabilities and the use of spatial data and analysis in field-based assessments. 

IPS Correspondent Tharanga Yakupitiyage interviews UNAI PASCUAL, one of the co-chairs of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

The aim of this call for projects is to select 6-8 research projects that will increase our understanding about issues related to climate change and biodiversity. The projects will receive financial support from the BNP Paribas Foundation for a three-year period (2020-2022).

GLP Members Oliver Coomes and Graham MacDonald, and SSC Member Navin Ramankutty, published their research in Nature Sustainability.

GLP Member Andrea Izquierdo and Latin America Nodal Office Coordinator Ricardo Grau published an article in Mountain Research and Development about the Puna region of Argentina based on land use trends over the last 57 years and on their expertise in the region.

We are pleased to inform you about the Call for Applications for the second cohort of the Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership and kindly ask you to forward the call to postdocs who conduct sustainability research and encounter challenges of and with “scale” and “scaling”.

If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too. That’s the basic conclusion of a sweeping new study issued in December by the World Resources Institute, an environmental group. The report warns that the world’s agricultural system will need drastic changes in the next few decades in order to feed billions more people without triggering a climate catastrophe, writes The New York Times.

The second order draft (SOD) of the IPCC Special Reports on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) and Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) are open for expert review until 11 January 2019, with registration closing 4 January 2019.

SSC Member Ricardo Grau has a new book in Spanish out, "The Argentine Puna: Nature and Culture."

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a joint center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute, Columbia University, is pleased to announce that applications are open for their 7th annual Executive Training on Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development, which will be held at Columbia University from June 3-14, 2019.

GLP Member Lisa Kelley published recently on the variability in pathways of smallholder cacao expansion and land use and cover change (LUCC) over the past four decades in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia.

A new course is being offered in Remote Sensing in Land Science Studies within a Master Program in Geography and Geoinformatics at the University of Copenhagen. The course aims to concentrate on advancing skills in the application of satellite remote sensing in interdisciplinary land change studies.

This symposium builds on a long tradition of research in land use and land cover, and on coupled natural and human systems, within Geography and other related disciplines. Papers addressing the symposium theme and the broad range of topics this includes are encouraged, as are ideas for panel sessions. Paper and panel sessions will be compiled from the individually submitted abstracts.

Colleagues are invited to submit papers to a Special Issue of Land on “Restoring Degraded Lands to Attain the UN-SDGs” aims to address the sustainability challenges of land degradation and showcase innovative and promising practices and success stories from across the world for restoring degraded lands to attain global sustainability by 2030.

Springer has a new journal publishing articles that feature the use of remote sensing data to study earth processes. Includes all aspects of Earth Sciences (atmospheric sciences, biogeosciences, climate / climate change, hydrology, cryosphere, oceans, etc.)

The journal Mountain Research and Development is looking for papers that address this topic. Notices of intent are due by 30 September 2018, full papers by 1 February 2019.

GLP Fellow Erle Ellis has published an opinion piece in The New York Times urging people to start talking about what kind of planet we want to live on.

A recent paper in Nature Sustainability highlights how agricultural intensification often fails to provide benefits for both human well-being and ecosystems. Author and GLP SSC Member Unai Pascual discusses the details.

As is common in the developing world, people in East Africa still typically cook their meals with wood or charcoal – i.e. locally available biomass. Usually over a simple fire. But resulting deforestation, resource scarcity, and respiratory illnesses mean alternatives are urgently needed. CDE researchers and GLP members studied the implications of possible short-term improvements.

A new podcast from the Aliance of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Societies (ACSESS) is about past and present advances in the fields of agronomic, crop, soil, and environmental sciences. New episodes are released on the third Friday of every month.

New analysis, from Trase, identifies the deforestation risks associated with the supply chain of one of the world´s most traded agricultural commodities – Brazilian soy, linking the companies and consumer countries to the regions where the soy is grown.

Colleagues from the Centre for Development and Environment and the Institute of Geography of the University of Bern will be convening two panels in the Swiss Researching Africa Days 2018, which will take place on 26–28 October 2018 in Bern, Switzerland. The panel topics are "Dynamics between globalized land and local well-being in Africa" and "Environmental justice and land management practices in Africa".

The first order draft (FOD) of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land is open for expert review until 5 August 2018, with registration closing 29 July 2018.

Land-use intensification in agrarian landscapes is seen as a key strategy to simultaneously feed humanity and use ecosystems sustainably, but the conditions that support positive social-ecological outcomes remain poorly documented. A new article by several GLP Fellows and Members addresses this knowledge gap by synthesizing research that analyses how agricultural intensification affects both ecosystem services and human well-being in low- and middle-income countries.

GLP Fellow Morgan Grove is spearheading a project for the U.S. Forest Service that matches non-profits employing formerly incarcerated workers who deconstruct abandoned buildings in big metropolises such as Baltimore with private companies looking for a dependable supply of reclaimed lumber.

Former GLP Executive Officer Sébastien Boillat and GLP Member Chinwe Ifejika Speranza invite abstracts for their Swiss Geosciences Meeting session, "Sustainable social-ecological systems: from local to global challenges".

Applications are welcome for a summer school on Archetype Analysis at HU Berlin from 8-12 October 2018, led by GLP Working Group Coordinators Klaus Eisenack, Christoph Oberlack and Diana Seitz and additional GLP Members. The application deadline is June 29, 2018.

SSC Member Navin Ramankutty and GLP Members Zia Mehrabi and Katharina Waha review the successes and failures of the global food system, addressing ongoing debates on pathways to environmental health and food security. To deal with these challenges, a new coordinated research program blending modern breeding with agro-ecological methods is needed. They call on plant biologists to lead this effort and help steer humanity toward a safe operating space for agriculture.

Missed the Seedbeds of Transformation conference in South Africa in May? Read the updated conference blog, check out conference highlights, and see photos from the event. We also have links to media coverage of the event.

GEDI will make precise measurements of forest canopy height, canopy vertical structure, and surface elevation. It will radically improve our ability to characterize aboveground biomass, carbon and water cycling processes, biodiversity, and habitat. It is currently scheduled for launch on November 29, 2018.

For a Special Issue of Land, GLP Members Dr. Thilde Bech Bruun and Dr. Cornelia Hett as well as colleague Dr. Rob Cramb seek papers that provide new empirical evidence, review papers, and meta-analyses of case studies from the region. They are particularly interested in papers that look at the causes and effects of land-use changes from a multi- or interdisciplinary perspective, from a landscape level to a regional level.

High-hopes are placed on the intensification of cattle ranching to reconcile agriculture and forest conservation in Latin America. A new study published in Sustainability by GLP Member Erasmus zu Ermgassen and colleagues looks at six on-the-ground efforts in the Brazilian Amazon to make this a reality.

There is currently an opportunity to engage with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The organization seeks expert nominations for the assessment on values and the assessment of the sustainable use of wild species.

GLP Member Dr. Qiangyi Yu has been working on the "harvested area gap", a relatively new concept that measures the potential harvested area if all croplands are cultivated as frequently as possible. Here he summarizes several of the resulting publications.

GLP Taipei Nodal Office together with GLP Japan Nodal Office, are pleased to announce the call for abstracts for the GLP 2018 Asia Conference "Transitioning to Sustainable Development of Land Systems through Teleconnection and Telecouplings" to be held in Taipei, Taiwan on 03-05 September 2018.