Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforestation spatially across the Amazon during the early 21st century.

In the last decade, Myanmar’s Kachin State has seen a boom in tissue-culture banana plantations driven by cross-border Chinese investors. This Case Study compiles field research and publicly available knowledge about the scale of the production and its economic, social and environmental consequences. The study provides a detailed snapshot of the investment model and key actors in Kachin State, the methods of land access, landscape outcomes, and experiences of plantation workers.

The reform of collective land ownership in post-socialist contexts offers a useful window into how changes in property rights shape and structure the dynamics of territorial transformation. Focusing on China's rural revitalization campaign, this paper demonstrates how the state, as creator and regulator of land rights and property titles, facilitates landscape change by relaxing regulations over the lease of rural land and creating market institutions that favour land transfers to organized capital, in this case tourism companies and property developers.

The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of cropland reasonably well, but not recent expansion (1992–2015).

This paper estimates global logistic regression and logistic geographically weighted regression (GWR) models of urban growth in the adjacent border cities of Laredo, Texas in the United States and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas in Mexico, for two time periods from 1985 to 2014. Historical land use and land cover patterns were monitored through Landsat imagery from the United States Geological Survey to identify instances of urban growth through land type change. Data on socioeconomic variables related to urban growth were collected from various sources and used as independent variables.

Global changes impact the human-environment relationship, and, in particular, they affect the provision of ecosystem services. Mountain ecosystems provide a wide range of such services, but they are highly sensitive and vulnerable to change due to various human pressures and natural processes. We conducted a literature survey that focused on two main issues. The first was the identification of quantitative methods aimed at assessing the impact of land use changes in mountain regions and the related ecosystem services.

The accelerated development of new urban areas has an impact on changes in the spatial use and complexity of ecosystems.

Using the Web of Science database, 1498 research articles published between 1900 and 2019 on the subject of farmland abandonment were retrieved. With the help of the SciMAT tool, a theme strategic diagram, overlay map and evolution map represented by keywords were constructed, and the strategic coordinate analysis and data flow analysis methods were used to analyze the research themes, evolutionary states and paths of farmland abandonment in different research time periods.

Changes in the amount and location of cropland areas may affect the potential crop production at different spatial scales. However, most studies ignore the impacts of cropland displacement on potential crop production. In many countries, cropland protection policies mainly aim for no loss in cropland area, while there is no restriction on change of cropland location. Taking China as the study area, we analyze the impacts of cropland displacement on potential crop production at four administrative levels during the period 2000 and 2018.

This study investigates the spatial expansion process, the de facto land use change, and their endogenous driving forces in the village of Fengzhuang since the 1990s. Fengzhuang is a specialized village in Hebei, North China, in which above 80% of rural residents are engaged in the manufacturing of mahogany furniture. Land use data were extracted from a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) survey conducted in 2014–2015. The results suggest that the land in Fengzhuang has been expanding rapidly under the influence of the informal furniture industry.

Urban development and species invasion are two major global threats to biodiversity. These threats often co-occur, as developed areas are more prone to species invasion. However, few empirical studies have tested if both factors affect biodiversity in similar ways. Here we study the individual and combined effects of urban development and plant invasion on the composition of arthropod communities.