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Abstract The adoption of conservation agriculture methods, such as conservation tillage and cover cropping, is a viable alternative to conventional farming practices for improving soil health and reducing soil carbon losses. Despite their significance in mitigating climate change, there are very few studies that have assessed the overall spatial distribution of cover crops and tillage practices based on the farm’s pedoclimatic and topographic characteristics. Hence, the primary objective of this study was to use multiple satellite-derived indices and environmental drivers to infer the level of tillage intensity and identify the presence of cover crops in eastern South Dakota (SD). We used a machine learning classifier trained with in situ field samples and environmental drivers acquired from different remote sensing datasets for 2022 and 2023 to map the conservation agriculture practices. Our classification accuracies (>80%) indicate that the employed satellite spectral indices and environmental variables could successfully detect the presence of cover crops and the tillage intensity in the study region. Our analysis revealed that 4% of the corn (Zea mays) and soybean (Glycine max) fields in eastern SD had a cover crop during either the fall of 2022 or the spring of 2023. We also found that environmental factors, specifically seasonal precipitation, growing degree days, and surface texture, significantly impacted the use of conservation practices. The methods developed through this research may provide a viable means for tracking and documenting farmers’ agricultural management techniques. Our study contributes to developing a measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) solution that could help used to monitor various climate-smart agricultural practices. 

Abstract As billions of nocturnal avian migrants traverse North America, twice a year they must contend with landscape changes driven by natural and anthropogenic forces, including the rapid growth of the artificial glow of the night sky. While airspaces facilitate migrant passage, terrestrial landscapes serve as essential areas to restore energy reserves and often act as refugia—making it critical to holistically identify stopover locations and understand drivers of use. Here, we leverage over 10 million remote sensing observations to develop seasonal contiguous United States layers of bird migrant stopover density. In over 70% of our models, we identify skyglow as a highly influential and consistently positive predictor of bird migration stopover density across the United States. This finding points to the potential of an expanding threat to avian migrants: peri-urban illuminated areas may act as ecological traps at macroscales that increase the mortality of birds during migration. 

Abstract This paper synthesizes the contemporary challenges for the sustainability of the social-environmental system (SES) across a geographically, environmentally, and geopolitically diverse region—the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB). This region includes 18 political entities, covering 10.3% of global land area and 30% of total global drylands. At the present time, the ADB is confronted with a unique set of environmental and socioeconomic changes including water shortage-related environmental challenges and dramatic institutional changes since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The SES of the ADB is assessed using a conceptual framework rooted in the three pillars of sustainability science: social, economic, and ecological systems. The complex dynamics are explored with biophysical, socioeconomic, institutional, and local context-dependent mechanisms with a focus on institutions and land use and land cover change (LULCC) as important drivers of SES dynamics. This paper also discusses the following five pressing, practical challenges for the sustainability of the ADB SES: (a) reduced water quantity and quality under warming, drying, and escalating extreme events, (b) continued, if not intensifying, geopolitical conflicts, (c) volatile, uncertain, and shifting socioeconomic structures, (d) globalization and cross-country influences, and (e) intensification and shifts in LULCC. To meet the varied challenges across the region, place-based, context-dependent transdisciplinary approaches are needed to focus on the human-environment interactions within and between regional landscapes with explicit consideration of specific forcings and regulatory mechanisms. Future work focused on this region should also assess the role of the following mechanisms that may moderate SES dynamics: socioeconomic regulating mechanisms, biophysical regulating mechanisms, regional and national institutional regulating mechanisms, and localized institutional regulating mechanisms.