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Higher yields are often assumed to lead to less deforestation, because more can be produced on less land. We find that this assumption is wrong, especially where market-oriented commodity agriculture dominates. Interestingly, higher yields actually reduced deforestation in areas where much land was inhabited or managed by Indigenous Peoples.

We are excited to invite applications for a new tenure track professorship on Conservation & Development! Join us at the Geography Department of Humboldt-University Berlin to work with an interdisciplinary group of scholars focusing on human-environment relations, global change, and sustainability! We are looking for candidates working at the intersection of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, with experience in the Global South.

Large herbivores play key roles for ecological restoration and rewilding strategies. In our assessment of the recolonization potential of European bison and moose, we identified regions with high potential for natural recolonization, with a need for developing strategies for enabling coexistence between people and large herbivores. Likewise, we show where barriers to movement, rather than habitat availability, limit range expansion, emphasizing the need for restoring broad-scale connectivity.

Supply chain stickiness refers to the stability of trade relationships, affecting land use, deforestation and rural development outcomes. Here we found the main factors determining local stickiness in Brazil’s soy supply chain. They include soy processing infrastructure, export-orientation of production, farm-gate price volatility and other context-specific factors that can explain the occurrence of stickiness as a supply chain phenomenon with relevant consequences for social and environmental conditions in producer regions.

Conservation planning traditionally has focused on identifying priority areas for threatened species. We developed an approach to additionally consider those species – threatened or not – that are important for local communities who use them. In this way, planning for protected areas that benefit both, conservation and sustainable development goals becomes possible. For the Chaco, this shows that large areas exists where such co-benefits could be leveraged.

By coupling species distribution models with different dispersal scenarios, we highlight that the ability of large carnivores to colonize and ultimately coexist with people in shared landscapes is likely most constrained by human pressure and their impact on dispersal behavior and not by available habitat.

By combining species distribution modelling with a spatial prioritization framework, we aimed to identify where grazing right buyouts should take place to reduce cheetah killing by herders and their dogs. Our results provide a novel approach to minimize the mortality risk for cheetahs in Iran.

Here, we used a combination of remote-sensing and field-measured productivity indicators to demonstrate that in temperate ecosystems brown bears attack more beehives in years of beechnut crop failure. Our study provides empirical evidence on how bottom-up effects of resource pulses, such as masting, shape the interactions between wildlife and humans. Furthermore, we demonstrate that combining weather cues and remote-sensing indicators of vegetation growth and phenology can explain and predict year-to-year variation in beechnut production linked to wildlife damage, which can help to improve conflict management and proactively reduce conflicts.

We gather all available information on tropical deforestation and its drivers and synthesize it to provide clarity on how agriculture drives deforestation. Up to 99% of all tropical deforestation is driven by agriculture, but only 45-60% of deforested areas actually were used for agricultural production.

We propose a new way of using satellite imagery to move from the reconstruction of land-cover/use change towards the identification of frontier processes – a major milestone towards better understanding how agricultural frontiers expand in tropical dry forests.