Cropland/pastureland dynamics and the slowdown of deforestation in Latin America

Abstract

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)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(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.

A Review of the Application of Optical and Radar Remote Sensing Data Fusion to Land Use Mapping and Monitoring

“…The themes covered and sensors used in the four studies that concluded no improvement upon data fusion were varied, ranging from mapping crop lands, degraded savannah and forests and using Landsat, ASTER, IRS-1C, SPOT, ALOS PALSAR, RADARSAT and ERS. Three of these studies (ID 4,31,38) used data from segmented land boundaries during analysis (done by only 15 of the whole sample of 50 land use-related studies, Table 5), performed fusion prior to data analysis (Table 7) and mapped continuous land use variables. In contrast, eight other studies also performed segmentation and fused data prior to classification (ID 3,11,13,17,26,29,37,45) and found an improvement in results using data fusion.…”

“…[30]) (Figure 1) potentially stand to gain most from the integration of optical and radar data. For example, a major current concern raised in the land systems literature today is understanding specific land use trajectories of different commodity crops, i.e., the share of deforestation caused or the sources of land for different crop types [37][38][39]. Improved ability to differentiate specific crops within broad crop land classes would strongly benefit this research, allowing understanding the complex linkages between different commodities and targeting interventions to improve the sustainability of commodity-specific supply chains [40,41].…”

“…Pre-classification or -modelling: fusion of input data 37 (1,3,4,7,10,11,13,14,15,16,17,18,21,22,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,44,45,46,47,48,50) Post-classification or -modelling: fusion of derived information 16 (2,5,6,8,9,12,19,20,23,28,34,37,42,43,44,…”

Meat consumption, health, and the environment

“…This involves both conversion of natural habitats to grassland and grazing and conversion to arable land to produce grain and soya for livestock consumption. De Sy and colleagues (67) estimate that~71% of rainforest conversion in South America has been for cattle ranching and a further~14% for commercial cropping, including soya for animal feed (pastureland is often subsequently converted to cropland) (68). In the past 20 years, exports of soya from South America to China (and other countries) have increased dramatically and now constitute one of the largest international commodity flows (Fig.…”

Unexpected Interactions between Agricultural and Forest Sectors through International Trade: Wood Pallets and Agricultural Exports in Costa Rica

“…More than 80% of the agricultural expansion that occurred in tropical regions over 1980-2000 came at the expense of forests [4]. In 2000-2010, a large part of agricultural expansion in Latin America occurred in forests [5]. Inversely, the abandonment of agricultural lands may lead to reforestation through natural regeneration and/or tree planting, a common phenomenon in Central America in recent decades [6][7][8].…”