Biodiversity policy beyond economic growth.

Increasing evidence-synthesized in this paper-shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far not allowed for absolute global reductions in resource use and pollution, we question the support for economic growth in these policies, where inadequate attention is paid to the question of how growth can be decoupled from biodiversity loss.

Mapping urban-rural gradients of settlements and vegetation at national scale using Sentinel-2 spectral-temporal metrics and regression-based unmixing with synthetic training data.

The increasing impact of humans on land and ongoing global population growth requires an improved understanding of land cover (LC) and land use (LU) processes related to settlements. The heterogeneity of built-up areas and infrastructures as well as the importance of not only mapping, but also characterizing anthropogenic structures suggests using a sub-pixel mapping approach for analysing related LC from space. We implement a regression-based unmixing approach for mapping , and for all of Germany and Austria at 10 m resolution to demonstrate the potential of sub-pixel mapping.

Modelling climate change impacts on maize yields under low nitrogen input conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) currently grow rainfed maize with limited inputs including fertilizer. Climate change may exacerbate current production constraints. Crop models can help quantify the potential impact of climate change on maize yields, but a comprehensive multimodel assessment of simulation accuracy and uncertainty in these low-input systems is currently lacking.

Attributing long-term sea-level rise to Paris Agreement emission pledges.

The main contributors to sea-level rise (oceans, glaciers, and ice sheets) respond to climate change on timescales ranging from decades to millennia. A focus on the 21st century thus fails to provide a complete picture of the consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on future sea-level rise and its long-term impacts. Here we identify the committed global mean sea-level rise until 2300 from historical emissions since 1750 and the currently pledged National Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement until 2030.

Modeling the spatial distribution of grazing intensity in Kazakhstan.

With increasing affluence in many developing countries, the demand for livestock products is rising and the increasing feed requirement contributes to pressure on land resources for food and energy production. However, there is currently a knowledge gap in our ability to assess the extent and intensity of the utilization of land by livestock, which is the single largest land use in the world. We developed a spatial model that combines fine-scale livestock numbers with their associated energy requirements to distribute livestock grazing demand onto a map of energy supply, with the aim of estimating where and to what degree pasture is being utilized.

Publisher Correction: Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change.

In this Letter, the PANGAEA repository was referred to incorrectly in the 'Code availability' and 'Data availability' sections of Methods: the link should be https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.

Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change.

Land-use changes are critical for climate policy because native vegetation and soils store abundant carbon and their losses from agricultural expansion, together with emissions from agricultural production, contribute about 20 to 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate strategies require maintaining or increasing land-based carbon while meeting food demands, which are expected to grow by more than 50 per cent by 2050. A finite global land area implies that fulfilling these strategies requires increasing global land-use efficiency of both storing carbon and producing food.

Drying and Rainfall Shape the Structure and Functioning of Nitrifying Microbial Communities in Riverbed Sediments.

Non-flow periods in fluvial ecosystems are a global phenomenon. Streambed drying and rewetting by sporadic rainfalls could drive considerable changes in the microbial communities that govern stream nitrogen (N) availability at different temporal and spatial scales. We performed a microcosm-based experiment to investigate how dry period duration (DPD) (0, 3, 6, and 9 weeks) and magnitude of sporadic rewetting by rainfall (0, 4, and 21 mm applied at end of dry period) affected stocks of N in riverbed sediments, ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) and rates of ammonia oxidation (AO), and emissions of nitrous oxide (NO) to the atmosphere.

Europe's renewable energy directive poised to harm global forests.

This comment raises concerns regarding the way in which a new European directive, aimed at reaching higher renewable energy targets, treats wood harvested directly for bioenergy use as a carbon-free fuel. The result could consume quantities of wood equal to all Europe's wood harvests, greatly increase carbon in the air for decades, and set a dangerous global example.

Spatial variation in determinants of agricultural land abandonment in Europe.

Agricultural abandonment is widespread and growing in many regions worldwide, often because of agricultural intensification on productive lands, conservation policies, or the spatial decoupling of agricultural production from consumption. Abandonment has major environmental and social impacts, which differ starkly depending on the geographical context, as does its potential to serve as a land reservoir for recultivation. Understanding determinants of abandonment patterns, and especially how their influence varies across broad geographic extents, is therefore important.

Landsat phenological metrics and their relation to aboveground carbon in the Brazilian Savanna.

Background: The quantification and spatially explicit mapping of carbon stocks in terrestrial ecosystems is important to better understand the global carbon cycle and to monitor and report change processes, especially in the context of international policy mechanisms such as REDD+ or the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Especially in heterogeneous ecosystems, such as Savannas, accurate carbon quantifications are still lacking, where highly variable vegetation densities occur and a strong seasonality hinders consistent data acquisition. In order to account for these challenges we analyzed the potential of land surface phenological metrics derived from gap-filled 8-day Landsat time series for carbon mapping.

Committed sea-level rise under the Paris Agreement and the legacy of delayed mitigation action.

Sea-level rise is a major consequence of climate change that will continue long after emissions of greenhouse gases have stopped. The 2015 Paris Agreement aims at reducing climate-related risks by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and limiting global-mean temperature increase. Here we quantify the effect of these constraints on global sea-level rise until 2300, including Antarctic ice-sheet instabilities.

Models meet data: Challenges and opportunities in implementing land management in Earth system models.

As the applications of Earth system models (ESMs) move from general climate projections toward questions of mitigation and adaptation, the inclusion of land management practices in these models becomes crucial. We carried out a survey among modeling groups to show an evolution from models able only to deal with land-cover change to more sophisticated approaches that allow also for the partial integration of land management changes. For the longer term a comprehensive land management representation can be anticipated for all major models.

[A spatially explicit analysis of traffic accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists in Berlin].

Background: In many German cities and counties, sustainable mobility concepts that strengthen pedestrian and cyclist traffic are promoted. From the perspectives of urban development, traffic planning and public healthcare, a spatially differentiated analysis of traffic accident data is decisive.

Objectives: 1) The identification of spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution of accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians, 2) the identification of hotspots and exploration of possible underlying causes and 3) the critical discussion of benefits and challenges of the results and the derivation of conclusions.

Biodiversity at risk under future cropland expansion and intensification.

Agriculture is the leading driver of biodiversity loss. However, its future impact on biodiversity remains unclear, especially because agricultural intensification is often neglected, and high path-dependency is assumed when forecasting agricultural development-although the past suggests that shock events leading to considerable agricultural change occur frequently. Here, we investigate the possible impacts on biodiversity of pathways of expansion and intensification.

Discarded surrogates, modified traditions, welcome complements: The chequered careers of alternative technologies in Berlin's infrastructure systems.

This article takes an historical perspective on current attempts to 'open up' established, centralized systems of urban infrastructure to alternative technologies designed to minimize resource use and environmental pollution. The process of introducing alternative technologies into, or alongside, centralized urban infrastructures is not a novel phenomenon, as is often assumed. The physical and institutional entrenchment of large technical systems for urban energy, water or sanitation services in industrialized countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did not close the door completely on alternatives.

Carbon emissions from agricultural expansion and intensification in the Chaco.

Carbon emissions from land-use changes in tropical dry forest systems are poorly understood, although they are likely globally significant. The South American Chaco has recently emerged as a hot spot of agricultural expansion and intensification, as cattle ranching and soybean cultivation expand into forests, and as soybean cultivation replaces grazing lands. Still, our knowledge of the rates and spatial patterns of these land-use changes and how they affected carbon emissions remains partial.

A transdisciplinary account of water research.

Water research is introduced from the combined perspectives of natural and social science and cases of citizen and stakeholder coproduction of knowledge. Using the overarching notion of transdisciplinarity, we examine how interdisciplinary and participatory water research has taken place and could be developed further. It becomes apparent that water knowledge is produced widely within society, across certified disciplinary experts and noncertified expert stakeholders and citizens.

Using fragmentation to assess degradation of forest edges in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Background: Recent studies have shown that fragmentation is an increasing threat to global forests, which has major impacts on biodiversity and the important ecosystem services provided by forested landscapes. Several tools have been developed to evaluate global patterns of fragmentation, which have potential applications for REDD+. We study how canopy height and above ground biomass (AGB) change across several categories of forest edges determined by fragmentation analysis.

Testing the Effectiveness of Environmental Variables to Explain European Terrestrial Vertebrate Species Richness across Biogeographical Scales.

We compared the effectiveness of environmental variables, and in particular of land-use indicators, to explain species richness patterns across taxonomic groups and biogeographical scales (i.e. overall pan-Europe and ecoregions within pan-Europe).

Forest transitions in Eastern Europe and their effects on carbon budgets.

Forests often rebound from deforestation following industrialization and urbanization, but for many regions our understanding of where and when forest transitions happened, and how they affected carbon budgets remains poor. One such region is Eastern Europe, where political and socio-economic conditions changed drastically over the last three centuries, but forest trends have not yet been analyzed in detail. We present a new assessment of historical forest change in the European part of the former Soviet Union and the legacies of these changes on contemporary carbon stocks.