Project SIGNAL: A Dashboard for Supporting Community Confidence in Making Data-Driven Decisions.

Context: Data dashboards have emerged as critical tools for surveillance and informing resource allocation. Despite their utility and popularity during COVID-19, there is a growing need to understand what tools and training are tailored to nonprofit community-based organizations that may partner with public health officials.

Program: In June 2021, the Rhode Island Department of Health and Brown University partnered to create Project SIGNAL (Spatiotemporal Insights to Guide Nuanced Actions Locally), which utilizes spatiotemporal analytics to identify Rhode Island's largest disparities in COVID-19-related outcomes (eg, testing, diagnosis, vaccinations) at the neighborhood level.

Emerging reporting and verification needs under the Paris Agreement: How can the research community effectively contribute?

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories represent the link between national and international political actions on climate change, and climate and environmental sciences. Inventory agencies need to include, in national GHG inventories, emission and removal estimates based on scientific data following specific reporting guidance under the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, using the methodologies defined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines. Often however, research communities and inventory agencies have approached the problem of climate change from different angles and by using terminologies, metrics, rules and approaches that do not always match.

Author Correction: Benchmark maps of 33 years of secondary forest age for Brazil.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Benchmark maps of 33 years of secondary forest age for Brazil.

The restoration and reforestation of 12 million hectares of forests by 2030 are amongst the leading mitigation strategies for reducing carbon emissions within the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contribution targets assumed under the Paris Agreement. Understanding the dynamics of forest cover, which steeply decreased between 1985 and 2018 throughout Brazil, is essential for estimating the global carbon balance and quantifying the provision of ecosystem services. To know the long-term increment, extent, and age of secondary forests is crucial; however, these variables are yet poorly quantified.

Characterising the biophysical, economic and social impacts of soil carbon sequestration as a greenhouse gas removal technology.

To limit warming to well below 2°C, most scenario projections rely on greenhouse gas removal technologies (GGRTs); one such GGRT uses soil carbon sequestration (SCS) in agricultural land. In addition to their role in mitigating climate change, SCS practices play a role in delivering agroecosystem resilience, climate change adaptability and food security. Environmental heterogeneity and differences in agricultural practices challenge the practical implementation of SCS, and our analysis addresses the associated knowledge gap.

Land-use emissions play a critical role in land-based mitigation for Paris climate targets.

Scenarios that limit global warming to below 2 °C by 2100 assume significant land-use change to support large-scale carbon dioxide (CO) removal from the atmosphere by afforestation/reforestation, avoided deforestation, and Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The more ambitious mitigation scenarios require even greater land area for mitigation and/or earlier adoption of CO removal strategies. Here we show that additional land-use change to meet a 1.

Author Correction: Amazonian forest-savanna bistability and human impact.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15519.

Amazonian forest-savanna bistability and human impact.

A bimodal distribution of tropical tree cover at intermediate precipitation levels has been presented as evidence of fire-induced bistability. Here we subdivide satellite vegetation data into those from human-unaffected areas and those from regions close to human-cultivated zones. Bimodality is found to be almost absent in the unaffected regions, whereas it is significantly enhanced close to cultivated zones.

Global change pressures on soils from land use and management.

Soils are subject to varying degrees of direct or indirect human disturbance, constituting a major global change driver. Factoring out natural from direct and indirect human influence is not always straightforward, but some human activities have clear impacts. These include land-use change, land management and land degradation (erosion, compaction, sealing and salinization).

CO2 emissions from land-use change affected more by nitrogen cycle, than by the choice of land-cover data.

The high uncertainty in land-based CO2 fluxes estimates is thought to be mainly due to uncertainty in not only quantifying historical changes among forests, croplands, and grassland, but also due to different processes included in calculation methods. Inclusion of a nitrogen (N) cycle in models is fairly recent and strongly affects carbon (C) fluxes. In this study, for the first time, we use a model with C and N dynamics with three distinct historical reconstructions of land-use and land-use change (LULUC) to quantify LULUC emissions and uncertainty that includes the integrated effects of not only climate and CO2 but also N.

How much land-based greenhouse gas mitigation can be achieved without compromising food security and environmental goals?

Feeding 9-10 billion people by 2050 and preventing dangerous climate change are two of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Both challenges must be met while reducing the impact of land management on ecosystem services that deliver vital goods and services, and support human health and well-being. Few studies to date have considered the interactions between these challenges.

How can land-use modelling tools inform bioenergy policies?

Targets for bioenergy have been set worldwide to mitigate climate change. Although feedstock sources are often ambiguous, pledges in European nations, the United States and Brazil amount to more than 100 Mtoe of biorenewable fuel production by 2020. As a consequence, the biofuel sector is developing rapidly, and it is increasingly important to distinguish bioenergy options that can address energy security and greenhouse gas mitigation from those that cannot.

Beyond predictions: biodiversity conservation in a changing climate.

Climate change is predicted to become a major threat to biodiversity in the 21st century, but accurate predictions and effective solutions have proved difficult to formulate. Alarming predictions have come from a rather narrow methodological base, but a new, integrated science of climate-change biodiversity assessment is emerging, based on multiple sources and approaches. Drawing on evidence from paleoecological observations, recent phenological and microevolutionary responses, experiments, and computational models, we review the insights that different approaches bring to anticipating and managing the biodiversity consequences of climate change, including the extent of species' natural resilience.

Ecosystem service supply and vulnerability to global change in Europe.

Global change will alter the supply of ecosystem services that are vital for human well-being. To investigate ecosystem service supply during the 21st century, we used a range of ecosystem models and scenarios of climate and land-use change to conduct a Europe-wide assessment. Large changes in climate and land use typically resulted in large changes in ecosystem service supply.