Dear colleague,

We’re closing out the year with a very full December issue! This month we have three really wonderful highlights for you. First, we extend the warmest of welcomes to our newest SSC members for 2022, Sofía Nanni and Daniel Müller.  Next, we are pleased to announce that GLP has formally become a member of the International Land Coalition. ILC is a global alliance of 250+ member civil society and intergovernmental organizations working together to put people at the centre of land governance. We are honored to join this network, and look forward to engaging more of you, the GLP LSS community, in our joint activities. Lastly, big congratulations to a stellar group of thirty GLP Members on Clarivate's Highly-Cited Researchers 2021!

Wishing everyone a peaceful and bright holiday, 
Ariane 

After an official vote at the Assembly of Members, the ILC welcomed 59 new members into its network in November, including GLP! ILC is a global alliance of civil society and intergovernmental organizations working together to put people at the centre of land governance. The shared goal of ILC's members is to realize land governance for and with people at the country level, responding to the needs and protecting the rights of women, men and communities who live on and from the land.

The Web of Science Group released its annual list of Highly Cited Researchers in November, and 30 GLP Members, SSC Members, and GLP Fellows were recognized on it.

The highly anticipated list identifies scientists and social scientists who produced multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication, demonstrating significant research influence among their peers.

The methodology that determines the “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts from the Institute for Scientific Information at the Web of Science Group.

The GLP YouTube channel has grown over the past few years and now houses more than 75 videos on land system science topics. The videos are organized into playlists to help you find what you are looking for, and many videos contain links to the slides and other speaker materials from the original events. Feel free to use these videos as you like, including for your own professional development and as supplementary material for your syllabi and trainings.

We publish new videos on a regular basis including the following:

• NEW! Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon 
• 3 January - Socio-Ecological Land System Research in Mexico
• 10 January - Land Systems and the Pandemic - Learning from Global Shocks
• 17 January - Governance of Human-Wildlife-Interactions in Peri-Urban Landscapes
• 24 January - How can LSS use the Land Matrix Initiative database?

Want to know when new videos are available? Subscribe to the channel and be notified automatically!

19 January 2022
14:00-15:30 Central European Time (UTC+1)

We invite you to join us for a webinar exploring the implications of recent work published in 2021 in PNAS and Annual Review of Environment and Resources confirming that thousands of years of increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped Earth's biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate in ways that matter now more than ever for sustaining nature and human well-being.

Presenters
Erle Ellis
Kees Klein Goldewijk
Delfin Ganapin, Jr.
Jacquelyn Gill

Discussants
Patrick Meyfroidt
Ruth DeFries
Navin Ramankutty

Space is limited for this event. All registrants will receive a link for the webinar recording.

Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people
A new paper in PNAS demonstrates an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 years across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km2).  The transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe. Read more

Trading deforestation—why the legality of forest-risk commodities is insufficient
A new paper in Environmental Research Letters uses Brazil as an example of how a legality criterion adopted by consumer countries is insufficient to protect forests and other ecosystems and may worsen deforestation and conversion risks by incentivizing the weakening of social-environmental protection by producer countries. Read more

The influence of company sourcing patterns on the adoption and effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments in Brazil’s soy supply chain
The authors of a new paper in Environmental Science & Policy used a metric of supply chain stickiness, calculated from temporal network analyses on the Brazilian soy export supply chain, as a proxy to explore their effect on the adoption and effectiveness of zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs). Read more

Global agricultural trade and land system sustainability: Implications for ecosystem carbon storage, biodiversity, and human nutrition
A new paper in One Earth brings together studies across different sustainability dimensions, and investigates how global agricultural trade flows have affected land systems and resulting impacts on food and nutrient availability, natural habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem carbon storage. Read more

Land use intensification increasingly drives the spatiotemporal patterns of the global human appropriation of net primary production in the last century
A new paper in Global Change Biology seeks to understand how increases in land-use intensity became the most important driver of human appropriation of net primary production across all biomes and settings. Read more