All Blog Posts

Quantifying the recarbonization of post-agricultural landscapes

April 19, 2023

Despite worldwide prevalence, post-agricultural landscapes remain one of the least constrained human-induced land carbon sinks. To appraise their role in rebuilding the planet’s natural carbon stocks through ecosystem restoration, we need to better understand their spatial and temporal legacies.

To tackle deforestation we need to focus on land use. Here's why

November 17, 2022

Agriculture is by far the most important cause of deforestation, yet cleared land is often not used to grow crops or raise livestock, according to new research. The findings have important implications for policy-makers hoping to clean up supply chains for commodities such as soy, beef and palm oil. Strengthening forest and land-use governance in producer countries has to be the ultimate goal of any policy response.

A Bird’s Eye View: Drone Imagery From the Vantage Point of Zambian Stakeholders

October 11, 2022

The authors of a new paper shared large prints of aerial images with various stakeholders in Zambian landscapes to discuss opportunities and risks of drone technology. The main question was: How are different types of aerial images used and interpreted by different groups of stakeholders?

Related Nodal Office(s): West Africa Nodal Office (GLP-NOWA)   Related Working Group(s): Co-Production of Sustainable Land Systems, Related Working Group(s): New Contributions of Remote Sensing to Land System Science in the Big Data Era

Long decline in soil moisture urges restoration of European wetlands

September 1, 2022

Following up on his previous blog post, Zsolt Pinke writes that the drought situation demands an urgent solution to the European agriculture and the recharge of soil moisture. The latest drought map published by the flagship journal of European agronomy draws attention to the most critical areas in Europe, which includes Ukraine, France and other important grain exporters of Central Europe. Post includes a one-minute animation of the July droughts in Europe based on the maps of EDO JRC.

Related Nodal Office(s): European Nodal Office   Related Working Group(s): Shifting Cultivation in Transition, Related Working Group(s): Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon

Profound regional transformation of European wheat and maize production over the last decades

June 16, 2022

A new study in Scientific Reports observed long-term trends in European cereal production from 1961 to 2017. As a result, the role of Central and Eastern Europe as a breadbasket of the world seems to have strengthened during the past decades due to the heavily increasing grain yields in the region. The implications of this for food security have been increasingly clear with the war in Ukraine, but escalating drought vulnerability of the southern part of Central and Eastern Europe also urgently triggers tangible solutions to mitigate climate challenge.

Related Nodal Office(s): European Nodal Office  
Wildfires in areas contaminated with Caesium-137 following Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986.

Growing concern about landscape fires in Chernobyl’s Nuclear Power Plant Zone following the armed conflict in Ukraine

March 31, 2022

The ongoing military escalation in Ukraine may release Caesium-137 from contaminated soils and vegetation. A group of scientists and remote sensing experts from Greenpeace and GLP members call for increased monitoring and assessment of the environmental and health implications and broader land system impacts of combat on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) and beyond.

Livelihoods, markets and conservation

January 25, 2022

This blog post summarises a recently published article based on in-depth mixed method research in a national park in northern Laos. The paper sets out the livelihood implications of increasing conservation interventions coupled with accelerating marketisation of resident livelihoods. The authors draw out the major livelihood strategies pursued by residents and highlight the inequitably distributed costs and benefits of conservation actions at the village sites.

Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Land systems’ insights from the pandemic and lock down

August 10, 2021

The organizers and several participants of a recent Working Group Meet & Greet put together this blog post summarizing the discussions held during the event. Although it will take time to make sense of the myriad changes the COVID-19 pandemic has brought and continues to bring into their lives as scientists, and into the socio-ecological land systems that they study, they identified several likely patterns of long-term change.

Related Working Group(s): Socio-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America , Related Working Group(s): Remittance Dynamics and Land Change, Related Working Group(s): Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon, Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Globally sharing land and its ecosystem functions through international trade

June 8, 2021

This blog post looks at which functions of land should be shared, how international trade of agricultural commodities affected the share of land between humans and other species over the last few decades, and what is the fair share of cropland between producing and consuming countries constrained by planetary boundaries. The blog post summarises work presented in a webinar hosted by the GLP Telecoupling Research Working Group in April 2021.

Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Governing telecouplings - Discussing evidence on company policies for reducing commodity-driven forest loss

March 20, 2021

In this blog post, Dr. Janina Grabs and PhD candidate Sam Levy share some first insights from their work on the effectiveness of zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Brazilian Amazon’s cattle sector and the Indonesian palm oil sector. The blog post summarises their work as presented in a webinar hosted by the GLP Telecoupling Research Working Group in December 2020.

Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Let us burn! Fire politics and recalibrating burdens of blame

March 6, 2021

In a recent paper in Geoforum, Wolfram Dressler and authors have shown how, in Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. This blog post examines their field research in more depth to provide additional perspectives on the paper.

Related Working Group(s): Shifting Cultivation in Transition

The challenge of modelling telecoupled land-use change

November 24, 2020

In this blog post, the authors introduce two new models, the TeleABM and the FLUTE, that are designed to study telecoupled land-use change but using different modelling approaches. Both models use soybean, one of the most traded commodities in the world, as an exemplary case to illustrate the ways in which they tackle the challenges of cross-scalar dynamics. The post reports on a joint webinar hosted by the GLP Working Group on Telecoupling Research held in September 2020 and featuring presentations by the three first authors.

Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Do-no-harm: lessons learnt from engaging pastoralists in co-production processes in Burkina Faso

November 15, 2020

Understanding the cultural values and social rules of stakeholders is critical to engage them successfully in a co-production process. Failing to do so, can not only threaten the project but also harm vulnerable stakeholders. This is the story of how putting the do-no-harm principle and the interest of vulnerable stakeholders above scientific interest has allowed us to have impact on the ground in Burkina Faso.

Related Working Group(s): Co-Production of Sustainable Land Systems

Has the GLP moved too far from its social ecological roots?

October 18, 2020

In this blog post, GLP Fellow Dennis Ojima argues the GLP needs to reengage with the ecological community to address the critical issues land systems face today. Due to the lack of ecological perspectives in the current construct of the GLP Science Plan, GLP research will only partially address changes in the land system and the pathway toward managing for these changes.

COVID-19, reverse migration, and the impact on land systems

September 16, 2020

To date, most reports on the mobility effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have emphasized international migration flows. In this blog post, the authors focus instead on urban–rural migration flows triggered by COVID-19, and how they could affect the way land systems are used, understood, and governed in the future.

Linking local-global nature conservation: a telecoupling perspective

September 2, 2020

This post summarizes the insights from the GLP Telecoupling Working Group's second webinar, which featured featuring working group member Sébastien Boillat and COUPLED PhD students Joel Persson and Siyu Qin. The post also discusses the importance of looking at conservation through a telecoupling lens.

Related Working Group(s): Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems

Current status, challenges and ways forward in modelling human-environment interactions in land systems

July 20, 2020

This post continues our series on OSM 2019 interactive and immersive sessions and provides an overview of session 360N at the conference, where organizers took the opportunity to convene an open, in-person community discussion on the state of the art, open challenges, and ways forward for SES models in LSS. 

3 tips for researchers on how to co-create land system knowledge with practitioners

May 14, 2020

This blog post by GLP Member Christine Ornetsmüller summarizes three practical top tips that emerged as a collective result from the immersive workshop session 355N Co-production of knowledge in landscape restoration at the Open Science Meeting of GLP in 2019.

Related Working Group(s): Co-Production of Sustainable Land Systems

Where does “culture” fit in land system science?

April 26, 2020

The third in our series on OSM 2019 interactive and immersive sessions, this post provides an overview of session 250N at the conference, where presenters considered whether the dominance of the perfectly rational "homo economicus" in land systems science has become a hindrance to advancing theory.

Labelling in Mediterranean agroforestry landscapes: a Delphi study on relevant sustainability indicators

April 9, 2020

A recent study, carried out by GLP Members Lukas Flinzberger and Tobias Plieninger with colleague Yves Zinngrebe from the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel, gives insights to experts’ opinions on the potential of product labelling from agroforestry and has just been published in the journal Sustainability Science. The researchers invited more than 20 agroforestry and labelling experts to a three-round Delphi study to evaluate chances and barriers for labelling of Mediterranean agroforestry products, considering the UN-Sustainable Development Goals. Out of 15 evaluated sustainability indicators, the authors recommend four in particular, which are distinguished by good comprehensibility and applicability.

Related Nodal Office(s): Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Region Nodal Office (MENA)  
Co-production Working Group members at the OSM 2019

Outlook for Co-production Working Group activities in 2020

March 27, 2020

We are excited to announce our planned activities for 2020, which grew out of the first live meeting of the group at the 2019 GLP Open Science Meeting in Bern. Learn more about our new co-production blog series about practical experiences (including successes and failures) in the field, a special issue about co-production in LSS, a creative set of live online events and group exchange formats, and a new quarterly e-newsletter featuring interesting events, training, online courses, etc.

Related Working Group(s): Co-Production of Sustainable Land Systems

Land use could bring solutions to both mitigating climate change and stopping biodiversity loss

March 10, 2020

At the seventh session of the Intergovernmental Platform of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) plenary in Paris in May 2019, delegates of the member states approved the Global Assessment report and its summary for policymakers. Here GLP Members Ralf Seppelt and Josef Settele provide a very brief overview of the results, explain the unique facets of IPBES, and elaborate how the GLP community could contribute to that process in the future.

Let's talk about scales: Eur-Agri-SSPs as example of nested scenario narratives for European agriculture and food systems

February 10, 2020

The second in our series on OSM 2019 interactive and immersive sessions, this post provides an overview of session 150N at the conference, where an enthusiastic group of researchers met to discuss some of the remaining and eventually persistent challenges in scenario development related to “scales” and “stakeholder buy-in”.

Developing an international research platform for dryland ecosystems: Global-Dryland Ecosystem Program

January 22, 2020

The new Global Dryland Ecosystem Program (Global-DEP) aims to develop an actionable research agenda to support sustainable dryland social-ecological systems that advance ecosystem management and sustainable livelihoods in the context of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). GLP Fellow Dennis Ojima is a member of the Interim Scientific Committee for Global-DEP, and he chaired an interactive session at the OSM 2019 to capture research and engagement directions from the GLP community, to foster collaborative activities with groups from other regions of the world, and to coordinate on-going research efforts within the GLP network to address dryland system concerns.

Perspectives on the 2019 Open Science Meeting, and the ways forward for land systems science

December 17, 2019

We hope you enjoyed the 2019 GLP Open Science Meeting in April in Bern as much as we did. Now that the dust has settled, and we all have had some time to digest all of the debates and discussions, we decided to revisit the conference through a series of blog posts.

Advancing archetype analysis for scaling-out sustainable land management

December 17, 2019

When decision makers want to scale-out sustainable land management practices, they need to decide where these practices may be most promising. This is a fundamental decision given the great diversity of land systems. To that end, leading land systems and land governance scientists, including researchers from GLP and beyond, discussed recent advances and frontiers of archetype analysis in the 3rd workshop on “Archetype Analysis in Sustainability Research” at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Related Working Group(s): Archetype Analysis in Sustainability and Land Governance Research
Photo: CIFOR / Flickr

Who is changing the way land is used?

September 28, 2019

GLP Member Žiga Malek provides a behind-the-scenes view of the research he published with GLP Members Jasper van Vliet, Emma van der Zanden and Peter Verburg in Environmental Research Letters.

Roots of the human age, the Anthropocene, deeper than previously thought

August 30, 2019

Global archaeological data show that human transformation of environments began at different times in different regions and accelerated with the emergence of agriculture. Nevertheless, by 3,000 years ago, most of the planet was already transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists.

Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Why digital land rights records matter: Lessons from Cyclone Idai

June 12, 2019

The loss of public records and personal documents following the disaster, is already having a tremendous impact on recovery efforts.

Synchronizing food production can have disastrous effects

May 4, 2019

While most of the time synchrony can be an awesome spectacle, when it comes to agriculture it is bad news, write GLP Member Zia Mehrabi and SSC Member Navin Ramankutty in The Conversation.

4th Open Science Meeting live conference blog from April 2019

April 26, 2019

Former Reuters Correspondent and Editor Jeremy Gaunt blogged live from the 4th Open Science Meeting in Bern, Switzerland, in April 2019.

Can more productive agriculture also be sustainable and resilient?

February 19, 2019

Innovations in farm system management and smart use of natural capital underlie the bulk of recent agricultural productivity growth. Coordinated research on total factor productivity (TFP) can show us how to ‘do more with less’ in agriculture, enhancing the sustainability and resilience of farming systems.

Co-production of knowledge in adaptive landscape approaches

November 6, 2018

How to navigate between singularity of case studies and production of actionable knowledge on complex human-environment systems? The GLP Working Group on Co-production of Sustainable Land Systems is addressing this question through an analysis of co-production practices in the field of land system science and a series of webinars. Learn more about the second webinar, which illustrated practical examples about adaptive landscape approaches, and access additional resources from the presenters.

Related Working Group(s): Co-Production of Sustainable Land Systems

Middle-range theories of land system change

October 6, 2018

In a new paper in Global Environmental Change, researchers from GLP and beyond argue that after decades of accumulating scientific work, our community is now in a position to consolidate theoretical insights on the dynamics of land systems in a way that both (i) builds on the very strong interdisciplinary character of land system science, and (ii) navigates the balance between generalization and contingency.

Considering people in systematic conservation planning: insights from land system science

Considering people in systematic conservation planning: insights from land system science

September 19, 2018

When conservationists decide to create a protected area to conserve biodiversity, they need to decide where to put it. This decision is more complicated than it may seem. In a new paper in Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, researchers Takuya Iwamura (Tel Aviv University), Yann le Polain de Waroux (McGill University) and Michael Mascia (Conservation International) argue that land system science can help systematic conservation planning overcome these issues.