Dr. Daniel Müller is Deputy Head of the Department of Structural Change of Farms in Rural Areas at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), where he leads Land Systems Group. Since 2014, he serves as Lecturer in the Geography Department at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The overarching goal of his research program is to advance understanding of land system change, including its multiple repercussions on human welfare, food production, carbon balance, and biodiversity. Dr. Müller approaches these issues through quantitative and qualitative assessments that combine his expertise in resource economics and environmental sciences. The geographic focus of his research is on the countries of the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and Eastern China. Dr. Müller is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Land Use Science.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems
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 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.
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.
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.
