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1. Post-NAFTA Changes in Peasant Land Use—The Case of the Pátzcuaro Lake Watershed Region in the Central-West México

   https://doi.org/10.3390/land9030075  

   Astier, Marta; Orozco-Ramírez, Quetzalcóatl; Walker, Robert; Galván-Miyoshi, Yankuic; González-Esquivel, Carlos; Simmons, Cynthia S. (March 2020, Land)

   null (Ed.)

   Rural life in México has changed drastically over the past several decades in the wake of structural reforms in the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in 1994. Researchers predicted dire consequences for smallholder farmers following trade liberalization and in certain respects the prophecies have been fulfilled. Indeed, many regions experienced significant out-migration as smallholders, unable to compete with global maize imports without price subsidies, sold or abandoned their lands, making way for the expansion of industrial agriculture into forests, secondary vegetation and primary crops. Nevertheless, many smallholders have adapted to the new economic environment with farming systems that manage risk by diversifying portfolios to incorporate commercialized maize and livestock production. This article examines the evolution of smallholder farming systems since the mid 1980s, when the impact of neoliberal reforms emerged, using data collected from field research on 130 smallholder farms in the Pátzcuaro Lake Watershed (PLW) in the State of Michoacán. Farmers in the PLW have been characterized as traditional peasant farmers, planting crops for subsistence, including a diverse array of domestic maize varieties and practicing limited animal husbandry with chickens, turkeys, pigs, an oxen and a cow or two for milk. But the results presented in this article show that the traditional peasant farming systems in the region have changed substantially to a highly diversified agriculture-cattle-forest system. Most notable changes include the use of fertilizers and pesticides; and the increase in livestock herd and reorientation to beef production. The results demonstrate the resilience of smallholder farmers, while at the same time raising potential concern that increased reliance on livestock and beef production specialization, might lead to shifts in farming systems that replace domestic maize varieties with hybrid corn used primarily for animal feed and thereby leaving vulnerable the genetic reservoir of traditional maize landraces. 

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2. A high spatial resolution land surface phenology dataset for AmeriFlux and NEON sites

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01570-5  

   Moon, Minkyu; Richardson, Andrew D.; Milliman, Thomas; Friedl, Mark A. (July 2022, Scientific Data)

   Abstract Vegetation phenology is a key control on water, energy, and carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Because vegetation canopies are heterogeneous, spatially explicit information related to seasonality in vegetation activity provides valuable information for studies that use eddy covariance measurements to study ecosystem function and land-atmosphere interactions. Here we present a land surface phenology (LSP) dataset derived at 3 m spatial resolution from PlanetScope imagery across a range of plant functional types and climates in North America. The dataset provides spatially explicit information related to the timing of phenophase changes such as the start, peak, and end of vegetation activity, along with vegetation index metrics and associated quality assurance flags for the growing seasons of 2017–2021 for 10 × 10 km windows centred over 104 eddy covariance towers at AmeriFlux and National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) sites. These LSP data can be used to analyse processes controlling the seasonality of ecosystem-scale carbon, water, and energy fluxes, to evaluate predictions from land surface models, and to assess satellite-based LSP products. 

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3. Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01232-w  

   Wu, Grace C.; Baker, Justin S.; Wade, Christopher M.; McCord, Gordon C.; Fargione, Joseph E.; Havlik, Petr (November 2022, Sustainability Science)

   Abstract Meeting ambitious climate targets will require deploying the full suite of mitigation options, including those that indirectly reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Healthy diets have sustainability co-benefits by directly reducing livestock emissions as well as indirectly reducing land use emissions. Increased crop productivity could indirectly avoid emissions by reducing cropland area. However, there is disagreement on the sustainability of proposed healthy U.S. diets and a lack of clarity on how long-term sustainability benefits may change in response to shifts in the livestock sector. Here, we explore the GHG emissions impacts of seven scenarios that vary U.S. crop yields and healthier diets in the U.S. and overseas. We also examine how impacts vary across assumptions of future ruminant livestock productivity and ruminant stocking density in the U.S. We employ two complementary land use models—the US FABLE Calculator, an agricultural and forestry sector accounting model with high agricultural commodity representation, and GLOBIOM, a spatially explicit partial equilibrium optimization model for global land use systems. Results suggest that healthier U.S. diets that follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans reduce agricultural and land use greenhouse gas emissions by 25–57% (approx 120–310 MtCO_2e/y) and pastureland area by 28–38%. The potential emissions and land sparing benefits of U.S. agricultural productivity growth are modest within the U.S. due to the increasing comparative advantage of U.S. crops. Our findings suggest that healthy U.S. diets can significantly contribute toward meeting U.S. long-term climate goals for the land use sectors. 

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4. Benchmark maps of 33 years of secondary forest age for Brazil

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00600-4  

   Silva Junior, Celso H.; Heinrich, Viola H.; Freire, Ana T.; Broggio, Igor S.; Rosan, Thais M.; Doblas, Juan; Anderson, Liana O.; Rousseau, Guillaume X.; Shimabukuro, Yosio E.; Silva, Carlos A.; et al (December 2020, Scientific Data)

   Abstract The restoration and reforestation of 12 million hectares of forests by 2030 are amongst the leading mitigation strategies for reducing carbon emissions within the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contribution targets assumed under the Paris Agreement. Understanding the dynamics of forest cover, which steeply decreased between 1985 and 2018 throughout Brazil, is essential for estimating the global carbon balance and quantifying the provision of ecosystem services. To know the long-term increment, extent, and age of secondary forests is crucial; however, these variables are yet poorly quantified. Here we developed a 30-m spatial resolution dataset of the annual increment, extent, and age of secondary forests for Brazil over the 1986–2018 period. Land-use and land-cover maps from MapBiomas Project (Collection 4.1) were used as input data for our algorithm, implemented in the Google Earth Engine platform. This dataset provides critical spatially explicit information for supporting carbon emissions reduction, biodiversity, and restoration policies, enabling environmental science applications, territorial planning, and subsidizing environmental law enforcement. 

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5. Forgotten forests: expanding potential land use in traditional Hawaiian agroecosystems, and the social-ecological implications

   https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-14656-280421  

   Lee, Tiffany; Lincoln, Noa (January 2023, Ecology and Society)

   The development of agricultural systems is a fundamental component of social-ecological transformation and a predominant factor influencing social behavior and structuring. However, oversimplification of traditional agricultural production often occurs and limits the understanding of past populations’ abilities to mitigate potential risks and enhance food security through effective land management strategies. The social-ecological traits that characterize the Hawaiian Islands provides a unique vantage to explore human ecodynamics over the longue durée and assess how these systems can be used to inform current and future land-use strategies, both locally and globally. Using the Hawaiian archipelago as a case study, digitized historical maps depicting a range of crop species and cropping systems were georeferenced to assess previous estimates of land use by early island populations and demonstrate the limitations of narratives constructed from previously modeled extents of land-use activity that rely solely on the preservation of archaeological remnants. The results of our mapped vegetation correspond well with the more intensive forms of agriculture that were included in previous models, but overall indicate that previous models do not fully represent the extent of land use by early island populations, missing vast applications of agroforestry and arboriculture. Based on our findings, we argue that the omission of cultivation systems not associated with physical infrastructure has vastly limited the comprehension of land use by early island populations and driven narratives in social-ecological dynamics that underestimate the extent of agricultural production while inferring sociopolitical outcomes based on the prevailing agricultural dichotomy. To remedy this limitation, we suggest a multimethods approach that integrates diverse data sets for an agricultural model that is more inclusive of all agricultural forms implemented by early Native Hawaiian populations and, therefore, is more representative of the extents of land use by island populations. 

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