Revealing land control dynamics in emerging agricultural frontiers.

ABSTRACT: The expansion of commodity agriculture into tropical and subtropical woodlands degrades ecosystem functionality, biodiversity, and the livelihood base of millions of people. Understanding where and how agricultural frontiers emerge is thus important. Yet, existing monitoring approaches typically focus on mapping deforestation and do not capture the shifts in land access and ownership that lay the ground for agricultural expansion, thereby missing early stages of frontier development. We develop an approach that captures these early dynamics and apply it to the entire 1,1 million km² of the Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot. Through the detection of linear features indicative of land claims and the analysis of their spatial-temporal dynamics, we reveal that the footprint of a

SUBMITTER: Del Giorgio O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12167985 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature