Amazonia holds the largest continuous area of tropical forests with intense land use change dynamics inducing water, carbon, and energy feedbacks with regional and global impacts. Much of our knowledge of land use change in Amazonia comes from studies of the Brazilian Amazon, which accounts for two thirds of the region. Amazonia outside of Brazil has received less attention because of the diffi...

EDITORIAL article Front. Earth Sci., 17 January 2023Sec. Hydrosphere Volume 11 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2023.1113184

We use data from two satellites and a terrestrial carbon model to quantify the impact of urbanization on the carbon cycle and food production in the US as a result of reduced net primary productivity (NPP). Our results show that urbanization is taking place on the most fertile lands and hence has a disproportionately large overall negative impact on NPP. Urban land transformation in the US has ...

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hyp...

The Fertile Crescent is a high biodiversity region where most temperate-zone agricultural species originated and were first domesticated. A favorable environment, a special plant community, and an adaptive population combined to initiate the Neolithic—the New Stone Age—in the Fertile Crescent. However, over time, valuable plant genetic resources of the region are being eroded through degradatio...

The USDA Farm Bill conservation programs provide landowner incentives to remove less productive and environmentally sensitive lands from agricultural production and reestablish them in natural vegetation (e.g., native grasses, trees, etc.) to achieve conservation objectives. However, removal of arable land from production imposes an opportunity cost associated with loss in revenue from commodit...

Urbanization imperils agriculture by converting farmland into uncultivable impervious surfaces and other uses that limit land productivity. Despite the considerable loss of productive croplands due to historic urbanization in United States, little is known about locations magnitudes extant agricultural still under threat future urban expansion. In this study, we developed a spatially explicit m...

Using marginal agricultural lands to grow energy crops for biofuel feedstocks is a promising option to meet the biofuel needs in populous China without causing further food shortages or environmental problems. Here we quantify the effects of growing switchgrass and Miscanthus on Chinese marginal agricultural lands on biomass production and carbon emissions with a global-scale biogeochemical mod...

Hann, Wendel J.; Wisdom, Michael J.; Rowland, Mary M. 2003. Disturbance departure and fragmentation of natural systems in the interior Columbia basin. Res. Pap. PNW-RP-545. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 19 p. We integrated landscape data from science assessments of the interior Columbia basin (basin) into one variable that func...

Urban expansion is one of the major drivers of agricultural lands loss. However, current remote sensing-based efforts to monitor this process are limited to small scale case studies that require much user input. Given the rate and magnitude of contemporary urbanization, there is a need to develop a land change algorithm that can characterize the loss of agricultural land at large scales over lo...