Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using...

Aim: Large and ecologically functioning steppe complexes have been lost historically across the globe, but recent land-use changes may allow the reversal of this trend in some regions. We aimed to develop and map indicators of changing human influence using satellite imagery and historical maps,...

We examine the historical legacy of the Soviet Union on the current rate of human-induced soil erosion in its successor countries. We use a spatial regression discontinuity design and high-resolution soil erosion data. Our results suggest strong discontinuities in current soil erosion rates...

Central and Eastern Europe has experienced fundamental land use changes since the collapse of socialism around 1990. We analyzeanalyzed the patterns and determinants of agricultural land abandonment and recultivation in Slovakia during the transition from a state-controlled economy to an...

Land system science and affiliated research linked to sustainability require improved understanding and theorization of land and its change as a social-ecological system (SES). The absence of a general land-use theory, anchored in the social subsystem but with explicit links to the environmental...

Livestock cultivation is a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 14.5% of the total anthropogenic emissions. China is responsible for a considerable share of the global livestock emissions, particularly caused by pork production. We used the Kaya identity and the...

Changes in land management and climate alter vegetation dynamics, but the determinants of vegetation changes often remain elusive, especially in global drylands. Here we assess the determinants of grassland greenness on the Mongolian Plateau, one of the world's largest grassland biomes, which...

Actor-level data on large-scale commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. The peculiar choice of transnational investing in African land has, therefore, been subject to conjecture. Addressing this gap, we reconstructed the underlying logics of investment location choices in a...

Mountains play a critical role in water cycles in semiarid regions by providing for the majority of the total runoff. However, hydroclimatic conditions in mountainous regions vary considerably in space and time, with high interannual fluctuations driven by large-scale climate oscillations. Here,...

Распад социализма в Восточной Европе и России, переход от плановой экономики к рыночной вызвал значительные социально-экономические и институциональные...