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Abstract Conservation efforts under the nature-based solutions (NbS) framework aim at better management of ecosystems and improvement of human well-being. Policies targeting forest-based livelihoods align well with the NbS principles, but their social-ecological outcomes are often confounded by complex human-environment interactions. In this study, we identify one major feedback effect of the ecosystem dynamic on people’s livelihoods based on datasets collected from two study areas in China and Nepal. Our methodology integrates satellite remote sensing, household surveys, and statistical models to investigate households’ cropland abandonment decisions under the influence of crop-raiding by wildlife. Results show that cropland parcels that have experienced crop-raiding are more likely to be abandoned in the following years. The more damage the crops have suffered on a given parcel, the more likely it is that the parcel will be abandoned. Parcels in proximity to natural forests, farther away from the house location, and with poorer access to paved roads bear a higher risk of being abandoned. These effects are robust and consistent after controlling for multiple parcel features and household characteristics at different levels and using the dataset from each study area separately. We conclude that policymakers need to consider this undesirable feedback of the ecological system to the livelihoods of local people to better achieve co-benefits for ecosystems and human society. 

Forests play a key role in the mitigation of global warming and provide many other vital ecosystem goods and services. However, as forest continues to vanish at an alarming rate from the surface of the planet, the world desperately needs knowledge on what contributes to forest preservation and restoration. Migration, a hallmark of globalization, is widely recognized as a main driver of forest recovery and poverty alleviation. Here, we show that remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery that would otherwise be unlikely with mere migration, realizing the additionality of payments for ecosystem services for China’s largest reforestation policy, the Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP). Guided by the framework that integrates telecoupling and coupled natural and human systems, we investigate forest-livelihood dynamics under the CCFP through the lens of rural out-migration and remittance using both satellite remote sensing imagery and household survey data in two representative sites of rural China. Results show that payments from the CCFP significantly increases the probability of sending remittance by out-migrants to their origin households. We observe substantial forest regeneration and greening surrounding households receiving remittance but forest decline and browning in proximity to households with migrants but not receiving remittance, as measured by forest coverage and the Enhanced Vegetation Index derived from space-borne remotely sensed data. The primary mechanism is that remittance reduces the reliance of households on natural capital from forests, particularly fuelwood, allowing forests near the households to recover. The shares of the estimated ecological and economic additionality induced by remittance are 2.0% (1.4%∼3.8%) and 9.7% (5.0%∼15.2%), respectively, to the baseline of the reforested areas enrolled in CCFP and the payments received by the participating households. Remittance-facilitated forest regeneration amounts to 12.7% (6.0%∼18.0%) of the total new forest gained during the 2003–2013 in China. Our results demonstrate that remittance constitutes a telecoupling mechanism between rural areas and cities over long distances, influencing the local social-ecological gains that the forest policy intended to stimulate. Thus, supporting remittance-sending migrants in cities can be an effective global warming mitigation strategy. 

Generating a high-quality explainable summary of a multi-review corpus can help people save time in reading the reviews. With natural language processing and text clustering, people can generate both abstractive and extractive summaries on a corpus containing up to 967 product reviews (Moody et al. 2022). However, the overall quality of the summaries needs further improvement. Noticing that online reviews in the corpus come from a diverse population, we take an approach of removing irrelevant human factors through pre-processing. Apply available pre-trained models together with reference based and reference free metrics, we filter out noise in each review automatically prior to summary generation. Our computational experiments evident that one may significantly improve the overall quality of an explainable summary from such a pre-processed corpus than from the original one. It is suggested of applying available high-quality pre-trained tools to filter noises rather than start from scratch. Although this work is on the specific multi-review corpus, the methods and conclusions should be helpful for generating summaries for other multi-review corpora. 

Sahelian West Africa is a region that has high population densities and that has frequent severe droughts and enormous pressure on natural resources. Because of these challenges, it is the place where the term desertification was originally coined. Recently, however, experts have identified large zones of greening where the amount of vegetation exceeds what one would expect based on rainfall alone. This pattern is well documented, but its mechanisms remain poorly understood. This research employs participatory mapping linked with high-resolution satellite imagery to better understand the human role behind regional vegetation trends. Through a case study of three communities in northern Burkina Faso, this paper presents a pilot methodology for explicitly mapping perceived areas of both land degradation and rehabilitation. Combining participatory mapping exercises with standard image classification techniques allows areas of land degradation and rehabilitation to be precisely located and their extents measured for individual communities and their surrounding terroirs. Results of the spatial analysis show that the relative proportion of greening and browning varies among communities. In the case of Sakou, nearly 60 percent of its terroir is degraded. While in another, Kouka, this is 48 percent. This method also elicits perspectives of Burkinabè agro-pastoralists on the local land-use practices driving these twin environmental processes. Altogether, this case study demonstrates the analytical power of integrating ethnography and high-resolution satellite imagery to provide a bottom-up perspective on social-ecological dynamics. 

The Re-Greening of the West African Sahel has attracted great interdisciplinary interest since it was originally detected in the mid-2000s. Studies have investigated vegetation patterns at regional scales using a time series of coarse resolution remote sensing analyses. Fewer have attempted to explain the processes behind these patterns at local scales. This research investigates bottom-up processes driving Sahelian greening in the northern Central Plateau of Burkina Faso—a region recognized as a greening hot spot. The objective was to understand the relationship between soil and water conservation (SWC) measures and the presence of trees through a comparative case study of three village terroirs, which have been the site of long-term human ecology fieldwork. Research specifically tests the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between SWC and tree cover. Methods include remote sensing of high-resolution satellite imagery and aerial photos; GIS procedures; and chi-square statistical tests. Results indicate that, across all sites, there is a significant association between SWC and trees (chi-square = 20.144, p ≤ 0.01). Decomposing this by site, however, points out that this is not uniform. Tree cover is strongly associated with SWC investments in only one village—the one with the most tree cover (chi-square = 39.098, p ≤ 0.01). This pilot study concludes that SWC promotes tree cover but this is heavily modified by local contexts.