This work aims to provide a comprehensive, wall-to-wall analysis of land use/cover changes in the continental areas of Portugal and Spain between 1990 and 2012. This overall objective is developed into two main research questions: (1) Whether differences between the extent and prevalence of changes exist between both countries and (2) which are the hotspots of change (areas where a given land use/cover transition dominates the landscape) in each country.

Identifying protected areas most susceptible to climate change and deforestation represents critical information for determining conservation investments. Development of effective landscape interventions is required to ensure the preservation and protection of these areas essential to ecosystem service provision, provide high biodiversity value, and serve a critical habitat connectivity role.

In this study, methods, originally developed to assess life course trajectories, are explored in order to evaluate land change through the analysis of sequences of land use/cover. Annual land cover maps which describe land use/land cover change for the 1985–2017 period for a large region in Northeast Brazil were analyzed. The most frequent sequences, the entropy and the turbulence of the land trajectories, and the average time of permanence were computed. Clusters of similar sequences were determined using different dissimilarity measures.

Deforestation and forest degradation (D&D) in the tropics have continued unabated and are posing serious threats to forests and the livelihoods of those who depend on forests and forest resources. Smallholder farmers are often implicated in scientific literature and policy documents as important agents of D&D. However, there is scanty information on why smallholders exploit forests and what the key drivers are. We employed behavioral sciences approaches that capture contextual factors, attitudinal factors, and routine practices that shape decisions by smallholder farmers.

Deforestation is recognized as a major driver of the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It also disturbs natural processes such as biogeochemical, hydrological, and ecological cycles. In Malawi, deforestation is estimated to be responsible for the loss of 33,000 hectares per year, and is mainly attributed to agriculture expansion, tobacco growing, and excessive use of biomass. However, little research has been conducted at either the local level or that of forests located on customary land.

Peatland plays an important ecological and economic role in many countries all over the world. At the same time, due to various human and non-human interventions, peatland is also a fragile ecosystem, which is currently facing severe problems, such as deforestation, fires, and peat subsidence. Peat subsidence is currently one of the most severe but least recognized issues. Because of its interconnectedness with other peatland problems, peat subsidence intensifies when there is a lack of proper interventions.

Mountainous regions are more sensitive to climatic condition changes and are susceptible to recent increases in temperature. Due to urbanization and land use/land cover (LULC) issues, Cameron Highlands has been impacted by rising land surface temperature (LST) variation. Thus, this study was carried out to explore the impact of the LULC change on LST in the Cameron Highlands from 2009 to 2019 using remote sensing images acquired from Landsat 7 ETM+, Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI/TIRS), and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 11A Thermal sensors.

The Brazilian Amazon has 49.8 million hectares (Mha) of public forestlands not allocated by the federal or state governments to a specific tenure status: the so called undesignated public forests (UPF). Historically, these public forests have been vulnerable to land grabbers and land speculation. Here, we highlighted the imminent threat in UPF by quantifying their accumulated deforestation, all of which is illegal, for the period 1997–2018 and the potential illegal occupation.

One of the main causes of tropical forest loss is conversion to agriculture, which is constantly increasing as a dominant land cover in the tropics. The loss of forests greatly affects biodiversity and ecosystem services. This paper assesses the economic return from increasing tree cover in agricultural landscapes in two tropical locations, West Java, Indonesia and eastern Bangladesh. Agroforestry systems are compared with subsistence seasonal food-crop-based agricultural systems.

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes.

An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly contradictory evidence on land use change was interpreted in a way that overemphasised degradation.

Brazil’s Soy Moratorium solidified the world’s largest traders’ commitment to stop soybean purchases from production areas deforested after July 2006. The aim was to remove deforestation from the soybean supply-chain and halt one of the main drivers of forest loss in the Amazon biome. In this study, we investigated changes in deforestation at the property-level for the period 2004 to 2014.