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.
