Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear, which is hampered by a lack of spatially and temporally...

Water withdrawals for irrigated crop production constitute the largest source of freshwater consumption on Earth. Monitoring the dynamics of irrigated crop cultivation is crucial for tracking crop water consumption, particularly in water-scarce areas. We analyzed changes in water-dependent crop...

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) aims to maintain forest carbon stocks above benchmark reference levels through financial compensation. However, countries with high forest cover and low deforestation (HFLD) are unlikely to be compensated fairly if REDD+...

Crop-aquaculture systems are widely adopted around the world as they can provide high protein and energy outputs per unit of land and raise farm incomes, particularly for smallholder farmers. Recently, a new crop-aquaculture system, which combines rice production with crawfish breeding...

Weather extremes become more frequent and intense with climate change, but how weather extremes impact household wealth in the Global South remains elusive in many regions. We combined nationally representative quarterly household panel data with climate data to evaluate the impact of weather...

Commodity agriculture continues to spread into tropical dry forests globally, eroding their social-ecological integrity. Understanding where deforestation frontiers expand, and which impacts this process triggers, is thus important for sustainability planning. We reconstructed past land-system...

Higher crop diversity can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services; however, it remains unclear to what extent and where crop diversity can be increased. We use spatially explicit multiscale optimization to determine potential and attainable crop diversity with field-level land use data for...

As the global food system contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, understanding the sources of GHG emissions embodied in different components of food systems is important. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a massive restructuring of the domestic food systems,...

Crop yields must increase substantially to meet the increasing demands for agricultural products. Crop yield increases are particularly important for Russia because low crop yields prevail across Russia’s widespread and fertile land resources. However, reliable data are lacking regarding the...

Widespread changes of agricultural land use occurred in Eastern Europe since the collapse of socialism and the European Union’s eastward expansion, but the rates and patterns of recent land changes remain unclear. Here we assess agricultural land change for the entire Carpathian ecoregion in...