Shifting to a Land Systems Paradigm in Conservation

Project Information

SystemShift

Grant agreement ID: 101001239

DOI

10.3030/101001239

EC signature date 25 June 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 125,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 125,00

Coordinated by

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SystemShift (Shifting to a Land Systems Paradigm in Conservation)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Biodiversity loss is a global crisis threatening human wellbeing, and the main driver is how we use land. Decisions about land use are made in social-ecological systems, yet conservation science is currently ill-equipped to consider the complex and dynamic interactions between land-use actors and their environment. This translates into conservation failures and missed opportunities. The overarching goal of SystemShift is to develop interdisciplinary concepts and approaches to establish a new, social-ecological perspective on land use in conservation. This promises major breakthroughs in our understanding of threats to biodiversity and how to design effective conservation strategies. SystemShift is organized in three main steps, each corresponding to specific objectives. STEP 1 will develop novel concepts to identify key combinations of land-use actors, practices, and threats to biodiversity, and organize them into a systems typology for conservation. This step will also design innovative indicators to map how threats vary and interact in space and time. These concepts will be applied and tested for poorly studied tropical dry forests globally. STEP 2 will empirically validate these concepts for two tropical dry forests regions in South America. Comparative social-ecological fieldwork will reveal how threats impact biodiversity, how land-use actors relate to threats, and how conservation actions influence actors. This will enable a major advance in conservation planning methods to consider land-use actors and dynamic threats and to rigorously evaluate when and where conservation is most effective. STEP 3 will integrate the project results to provide new, generalized insights into conservation challenges and opportunities in tropical dry forests globally, and to develop a novel land-systems framework for conservation assessments and planning. Through this, SystemShift will cross-fertilise between land system science and conservation science, laying the foundation for a new research agenda that integrates complex land systems into biodiversity conservation.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

SystemShift has made considerable progress in all major components. The main focus during the project's 1st phase has been on developing concepts to establish a land-system-based approach in conservation planning (STEP 1). This involved developing a novel, multi-scalar typology of land systems (= social-ecological systems focused on land use) that captures key land-use actors and activities, linking to both threats to biodiversity and possible opportunities for conservation interventions. SystemShift focuses on the world’s tropical dry forests, and a typology has been developed for this purpose. We regionalized for five dry forest regions in South America, Africa, and Asia (the proposal had foreseen to do this only for two regions in South America). Developing this typology was a highly interdisciplinary, collaborative project with dozens of experts on dry forests from around the world involved. The typology was published prominently, in Global Environmental Change, one of the top journals for Sustainability Science:
Pratzer […] & Kuemmerle (2024). An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands. Global Environmental Change, 86.
Considerable progress has been made in terms of generating and homogenizing the necessary datasets to map this typology for the focus regions (Argentinean Chaco and Bolivian Chiquitania), including reconstructing land change back to the 1980s and mapping key features related to land-use actors (e.g. smallholders living inside forests, feedlots). This work has not been published yet, but several steps toward it have been, most importantly:
Baumann […] & Kuemmerle (2022). Frontier metrics for a process-based understanding of deforestation dynamics. Environmental Research Letters, 17, 095010.
Cconsiderable progress has been also made on linking the typology to the concept of portfolios of threats as well as to trajectories of land-use change. These concepts have not been published yet, but steps towards them have been, incl.:
Levers […] & Kuemmerle (2024). What is still at stake in the Gran Chaco? Social-ecological impacts of alternative land-system futures in a global deforestation hotspot. Environmental Research Letters, 19.
A 2nd focus has been on implementing the demonstration phase (STEP 2), specifically, the field campaigns to sample biodiversity data and to survey land-use actors in land systems. This involved developing a survey design, establishing collaborations for these surveys with 15+ research teams and conservation organizations in Argentina and Bolivia, acquiring the necessary equipment and transferring it to the region, and setting up a data infrastructure to absorb incoming monitoring data.
In terms of biodiversity monitoring, field campaigns are in full swing, working with 10+ research teams in Argentina and Bolivia to collect what will be the largest biodiversity sample ever collected for the Chaco and Chiquitania regions. This, by itself, will be immensely valuable for these heavily undersampled and understudied regions. In total, we will sample in 2024 and 2025 21 large areas (>10,000 ha each), 520 individual locations with camera traps (to register mammals and large birds), and 250 sites with wildlife sound recorders (to register birds and amphibians). Two PhD students and a postdoc will work on the data generated.
Regarding the land-use actor work, a network of researchers and practitioners collaborating with us has been established, a survey questionnaire and implementation strategy have been developed, and the first pilot surveys have been rolled out in late 2023 and 2024. The full survey is planned to be implemented in the first months of 2025 (avoiding the hot and rainy summer season, when accessibility is low and land-use actors are not easy to reach). Two PhD students and one postdoc are working already on the data generated through the surveys and will continue to do so in 2025.
The final work package in the demonstration step of the project focused on conservation planning (WP6). The postdoc to implement this project component has been hired and considerable progress has been made to develope a conceptual and methodological framework for the prioritization work, building on the land-system typology developed in WP1.
Finally, the project has made major progress in terms of the synthesis component (STEP 3). This involved, e.g. mapping deforestation frontiers across the dry tropics and uncovering that these frontiers occur in areas of disproportionally high conservation value, and a high-level assessment of the neglected nature of dry forests, uncovering that much deforestation there happens ‘for nothing’. Also considerable conceptual developments linking land-system science and conservation science have been made, including the development of the typology outlined above, the concept of conservation frontiers, and
Buchadas […] & Kuemmerle (2022). Uncovering major types of deforestation frontiers across the world’s tropical dry woodlands. Nature Sustainability, 5, 619-627.
Buchadas […] Kuemmerle (2023). Tropical dry woodland loss occurs disproportionately in areas of highest conservation value. Global Change Biology, 29, 4880-4897.
Buchadas […] Kuemmerle (2022). Conservation frontiers: understanding the geographic expansion of conservation. Journal of Land Use Science, 1-14.
Pendrill […] Kuemmerle […] (2022). Disentangling the numbers behind agriculture-driven tropical deforestation. Science, 377, eabm9267.
Meyfroidt […] Kuemmerle […] (2024). Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers. R Soc Open Sci, 11, 240295.
In addition, the project has engaged in activities to link Land System Science and Conservation Science, with symposia and contributions at the European Conference of Conservation Biology 2022 in Prague and 2024 in Bologna, as well as several symposia that will take place at the Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Programme in Oaxaca later in 2024.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SystemShift seeks to progress beyond the state-of-the-art in at least six ways:
• Developing a novel land systems typology to structure complexity and to shift to an actor-centered land-use representation in conservation planning. This will enable for an intermediate level of complexity in conservation assessments and bring together the strengths of top-down and bottom-up approaches in conservation planning.
• Developing the innovative concept of portfolios of threats to biodiversity, including novel indicators to map biodiversity threats. This will move beyond the prevailing gap in spatial threat indicators and link threats to actors.
• Developing the novel concept of threat syndromes to track threats dynamically in space and time in order to address and consider these dynamics in conservation assessments.
• Explaining relationships between land-use actors and threats in order to detect and analyse feedbacks of conservation action on land-use actors, which will provide a basis for better evaluating what characterizes just conservation and increase conservation effectiveness.
• Developing new approaches, based on land systems, to include land-use actors and dynamic threats in conservation planning that will help to better prioritise conservation actions.
• Considerably increase our understanding of land-use change and the conservation challenges and opportunities these changes entail for the world’s tropical dry forests.

Tropical Dry Forest (Chaco)