Mosaic landscapes under shifting cultivation, with their dynamic mix of managed and natural land covers, often fall through the cracks in remote sensing-based land cover and land use classifications, as these are unable to adequately capture such landscapes' dynamic nature and complex spectral and spatial signatures. But information about such landscapes is urgently needed to improve the outcom...

This paper presents a world map of organic agriculture. A Gall-Peters projection map of the world is taken as the reference map (where map areas are proportional to territorial areas). Applying the area of organic agriculture to countries, the World Map of Organic Agriculture presents countries as proportional in size to their share of the total of world organic hectares (such a map can be refe...

Agricultural crop species represent a negligible part of the existing biodiversity. Over 50 percent of the daily global requirement of proteins and calories is met by just three crops – maize, wheat and rice (FAO, 1996) – and only 150 crops are commercialised on a significant global scale. On the other hand, ethnobotanic surveys indicate that, worldwide, more than 7,000 plant species are cultiv...

During the late nineteenth century, there was a rapid change in land use over a substantial area of Marlborough north of the Wairau River, including the Sounds, from mixed hardwood, podocarp and beech forests to pasture. Much of the hill country has been unable to sustain an economic level of pastoral farming and is currently in varying stages of reversion. A land use survey over an estimated 2...

The global cultivation area of genetically modified plants (GMPs) includ ing soybean, maize, cotton, canola (oilseed rape) and sugar beet has been increasing consistently since they were first cultivated commercially in 1996, reaching 160 million hectares (ha) in 2011 [1]. By 2011, the global area of planted insectresistant crops was 66 million ha. The rapid adoption of insect-resistant crops i...

During the next 50 years, which is likely to be the final period of rapid agricultural expansion, demand for food by a wealthier and 50% larger global population will be a major driver of global environmental change. Should past dependences of the global environmental impacts of agriculture on human population and consumption continue, 10(9) hectares of natural ecosystems would be converted to ...

A major global issue for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has been monitoring the world’s forests for the past 60 years. The news is not good; “Deforestation, mainly conversion of forests to agricultural land, continues at an alarmingly high rate — about 13 million hectares per year”, it reported this year. But, in a small glimmer of good news, it recorded that “forest planting, lands...