Cropland/pastureland dynamics and the slowdown of deforestation in Latin America
By J. Graesser, T. Mitchell Aide, H. R. Grau, Navin Ramankutty. 2015
231 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Latin America has the planet’s largest land reserves for agriculture and had the most rapid agricultural expansion during the twenty-first century. A large portion of the expansion replaced forests, as shown by many local and regional studies. However, expansion varied regionally and also replaced other land covers. Further, it is important to distinguish between changes in cropland and pastureland as they produce food at different levels of efficiency and intensity. We used thirteen years (2001–2013) of MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite imagery to characterize cropland and pastureland expansion at multiple scales across Latin America. From 2001 to 2013, 17% of new cropland and 57% of new pastureland replaced forests throughout Latin America. Cropland expansion from 2001 to 2013 was less (44.27 Mha) than pastureland (96.9 Mha), but 44% of the 2013 cropland total was new cropland, versus 27% of the 2013 pastureland total, revealing higher regional expansion rates of row crop agriculture. The majority of cropland expansion was into pastureland within core agricultural regions of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. On the contrary, pastureland largely expanded at frontiers, such as central Brazil, western Paraguay, and northern Guatemala. As others have suggested, regional agriculture is strongly influenced by globalization. Indeed, we find an overall decrease in agricultural expansion after 2007, coinciding with the global economic slowdown. The results illustrate agricultural cropland and pastureland expansion across Latin America is largely segregated, and emphasize the importance of distinguishing between the two agricultural systems, as they vary in land use intensity and efficiency.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fa4556fed0598d25432cc5c66d2ba8c18b4aa31
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Global and Planetary Change
- Daniel Müller
- Tobias Kuemmerle
- Jan G. P. W. Clevers
- Christian Levers
- Martin Herold
- K. Erb
- P. J. Verkerk
- Michael E. Schaepman
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- Hotspots of land use change in Europe (2016, background): “…has so far predominantly focused on conversions among board land-use classes, such as deforestation (e.g., Geist and Lambin 2002, Hansen et al 2013, Graesser et al 2015), urbanization (e.g., Deng et al 2008, Taubenböck et al 2012), or forest expansion (e.g., Rudel et al 2005, Meyfroidt and Lambin…”
- Land use patterns and related carbon losses following deforestation in South America (2015, background): “Clark et al (2012) and Graesser et al (2015) studied land use change across the South American continent in a systematic manner with MODIS imagery which gives some insight into drivers of deforestation.”
- Linking earth observation and taxonomic, structural and functional biodiversity: local to ecosystem perspectives (2016, background): “…levels, harvesting frequency and roduction (Erb et al., 2013; Kuemmerle et al., 2013; Estel et al., 015) or cropland and pastureland dynamics (Graesser et al., 2015). n order to be able to use global information about LUCC, global and cover characteristics like the IGBP DISCover from 1 km…”