We are pleased to welcome the following members who joined our working group this quarter:

Giulio Castelli, University of Florence, Italy
Victoria Junquera, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Clovis Grinand, NITIDAE, France
Kyungsoo Yoo, University of Minnesota, United States

Bruun, T. B., Ryan, C. M., Neergaard, A. De, & Berry, N. J. (in press). Soil organic carbon stocks maintained despite intensification of shifting cultivation. Geoderma (available online) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2020.114804

This paper documents that a short rotation shifting cultivation system had no effects on soil organic carbon stocks compared to old secondary forests. This conclusion challenges the often repeated narrative that shifting cultivation leads to declining soil carbon stocks, and asserts that land use policies should not be based on this incorrect assumption.

Hett, C., Pilakone, P., Kamp, K., Ingalls, M., Heinimann, A. (2020). Bottom-up land use planning for equitable rural development in Lao PDR. In Wymann von Dach, S. & Ruiz Peyré, F., eds. 2020. Vibrant mountain communities. Regional development in mountains: Realizing potentials, tackling disparities. Bern, Switzerland, Centre for Development and Environment(CDE), University of Bern, with Bern Open Publishing (BOP). 56 pp.

This paper presents key insights on the “why and how” of a participatory, bottom-up land use planning approach developed for shifting cultivation context in Laos.

Hurtt, G.C., Chini, L., Sahajpal, R., Frolking, S., Bodirsky, B.L., Calvin, K., Doelman, J.C., Fisk, J., Fujimori, S., Klein Goldewijk, K., Hasegawa, T., Havlik, P., Heinimann, A., Humpenöder, F., Jungclaus, J., Kaplan, J.O., Kennedy, J., Krisztin, T., Lawrence, D., Lawrence, P., Ma, L., Mertz, O., Pongratz, J., Popp, A., Poulter, B., Riahi, K., Shevliakova, E., Stehfest, E., Thornton, P., Tubiello, F.N., van Vuuren, D.P., Zhang, X. (2020). Harmonization of global land use change and management for the period 850–2100 (LUH2) for CMIP6. Geosci. Model Dev. 13, 5425–5464. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-5425-2020

The representation of shifting cultivation in Earth Systems Model has been significantly enhanced in the World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) as documented in this recent publication.

Kmoch, L.,  Palm, M., U., Persson, M., and Jepsen, M.R. (2020): Access mapping highlights risks from land reform in upland Myanmar, Journal of Land Use Science, DOI: 10.1080/1747423X.2020.1836053

This paper combines access theory with income accounting methods, to appraise how new legislation may alter land-access mechanisms and land-derived benefit flows of swidden communities in western Myanmar.

Terefe, B., Kim, D.-G., (2020). Shifting cultivation maintains but its conversion to mono-cropping decreases soil carbon and nitrogen stocks compared to natural forest in Western Ethiopia. Plant and Soil 453:105–117, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-019-03942-0.

This paper documents that conversion of shifting cultivation to mono-cropping decreased soil organic Carbon stocks (by 45–50%) and Total Nitrogen stocks (by 18-45%) over 10 years.

11 January 2021
9:15 a.m. Central European Time
Zoom

Laura Kmoch has submitted her PhD thesis ‘Remittances, Access & Adaptation: Options to Secure Rural Livelihoods in Morocco and Myanmar’. 

The thesis builds on data from household surveys and local knowledge research to explore how different income-generation activities, climate shocks and stressors, changing land-access mechanisms and frontier dynamics shape rural households’ livelihoods in the Fez-Meknès Region of Morocco and northern Chin State in Myanmar.  

You are very welcome to join, and Laura will post the link to the Zoom meeting on our Slack page (in the ‘general’ folder) when it is available. 

Profs. Oliver Coomes and Yann le Polain at the Department of Geography of McGill University are looking to recruit three graduate students to work on projects related to land-use dynamics in Panamá (carbon offset through agroforestry) and the Peruvian Amazon (remote sensing & secondary forest dynamics in shifting cultivation systems; floodplain agriculture), starting Fall 2021. If you are interested, please send your grade transcripts, CV, and cover letter by December 15, 2020, to oliver.coomes@mcgill.ca. More information on graduate programs in Geography can be found at https://www.mcgill.ca/geography/graduate, and information on graduate studies and applications at McGill are available at https://www.mcgill.ca/gps/.