Recent cropping frequency, expansion, and abandonment in Mato Grosso, Brazil had selective land characteristics

By S. Spera, A. Cohn, Leah K. Vanwey, J. F. Mustard, B. Rudorff, J. Risso, Marcos Adami. 2014

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This letter uses satellite remote sensing to examine patterns of cropland expansion, cropland abandonment, and changing cropping frequency in Mato Grosso, Brazil from 2001 to 2011. During this period, Mato Grosso emerged as a globally important center of agricultural production. In 2001, 3.3 million hectares of mechanized agriculture were cultivated in Mato Grosso, of which 500 000 hectares had two commercial crops per growing season (double cropping). By 2011, Mato Grosso had 5.8 million hectares of mechanized agriculture, of which 2.9 million hectares were double cropped. We found these agricultural changes to be selective with respect to land attributes—significant differences (p < 0.001) existed between the land attributes of agriculture versus non-agriculture, single cropping versus double cropping, and expansion versus abandonment. Many of the land attributes (elevation, slope, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, initial soy transport costs, and soil) that were associated with an increased likelihood of expansion were associated with a decreased likelihood of abandonment (p < 0.001). While land similar to agriculture and double cropping in 2001 was much more likely to be developed for agriculture than all other land, new cropland shifted to hotter, drier, lower locations that were more isolated from agricultural infrastructure (p < 0.001). The scarcity of high quality remaining agricultural land available for agricultural expansion in Mato Grosso could be contributing to the slowdown in agricultural expansion observed there over 2006 to 2011. Land use policy analyses should control for land scarcity constraints on agricultural expansion.

Subfields: Ecology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3471aa7a4c3ed64a142d9c9f3c0abe8b57ca0634

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In Ecology

1. Patrick Hostert
2. Matthias Baumann
3. Tobias Kuemmerle
4. Michael T. Coe
5. Christian Levers

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. Matthias Baumann
2. Tobias Kuemmerle
3. Christian Levers

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Matthias Baumann
2. Tobias Kuemmerle
3. Christian Levers
4. Daniel Müller

Citations in the corpus

• The Forests of the Amazon and Cerrado Moderate Regional Climate and Are the Key to the Future (2017, background): “example, in Mato Grosso state—one of the most active frontiers of agricultural expansion in the early 2000s– double-cropping increased by a factor of 6 to include over half of all croplands by 2011 (Spera et al., 2014).”
• Mapping cropland-use intensity across Europe using MODIS NDVI time series (2016, background): “MODIS vegetation indices allow the differentiation of single, double, or triple cropping, for example in Brazil (Galford et al 2008, Spera et al 2014), India (Biradar and Xiao 2011), the Mekong Delta (Sakamoto et al 2009), China (Li et al 2014), or themid-western United States (Wardlow and Egbert…”