Shade-grown coffee (shade coffee) is an important component of the forested tropics, and is essential to the conservation of forest-dependent biodiversity. Despite its importance, shade coffee is challenging to map using remotely sensed data given its spectral similarity to forested land. This paper addresses this challenge in three districts of northern Nicaragua, here leveraging cloud-based computing techniques within Google Earth Engine (GEE) to integrate multi-seasonal Landsat 8 satellite imagery (30 m), and physiographic variables (temperature, topography, and precipitation). Applying a random forest machine learning algorithm using reference data from two field surveys produced a 90.5% accuracy across ten classes of land cover, with an 82.1% and 80.0% user’s and producer’s accuracy respectively for shade-grown coffee. Comparing classification accuracies obtained from five datasets exploring different combinations of non-seasonal and seasonal spectral data as well as physiographic data also revealed a trend of increasing accuracy when seasonal data were included in the model and a significant improvement (7.8–20.1%) when topographical data were integrated with spectral data. These results are significant in piloting an open-access and user-friendly approach to mapping heterogeneous shade coffee landscapes with high overall accuracy, even in locations with persistent cloud cover.

Bacon, C., L. C. Kelley, and I. T. Stewart. 2021. Toward a feminist political ecology of household food and water security during drought in northern Nicaragua. Ecology and Society 27(1):16. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12716-270116

The foundational premise of the Anthropocene, constant across the range of proposed definitions, is that the biophysical world is now profoundly social. This carries substantive methodological implications: If the environment is ecosocial, surely the way it is studied must be, too. Yet, as our bibliometric analysis demonstrates, the bulk of academic articles on the Anthropocene published between 2002 and 2019 focus on its conceptual implications rather than embracing its analytical consequences. Further, of the subset of articles that engage the Anthropocene empirically, fewer than a quarter employ interdisciplinary methods at even a cursory level. In response, we outline an alternative approach, critical physical geography (CPG), which enables researchers to pick up the methodological and conceptual gauntlet thrown down by the Anthropocene. Work in CPG begins from the premise that all biophysical questions are also social, but it goes beyond a simple mixed methods approach to emphasize the politics both of how knowledge is produced and of how it is taken up outside academia. We illustrate the utility of a CPG approach for analysis of the Anthropocene via succinct examples of research in critical dendrochronology, geomorphology, and remote sensing.

Context: For nearly three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human well-being and livelihoods, communities, and economies in myriad ways with consequences for social-ecological systems across the planet. The pandemic represents a global shock in multiple dimensions that has already, and is likely to continue to have, far-reaching effects on land systems and on those depending on them for their livelihoods. Objectives: We focus on the observed effects of the pandemic on landscapes and people composing diverse land systems across the globe. Methods: We highlight the interrelated impacts of the pandemic shock on the economic, health, and mobility dimensions of land systems using six vignettes from different land systems on four continents, analyzed through the lens of socio-ecological resilience and the telecoupling framework. We present preliminary comparative insights gathered through interviews, surveys, key informants, and authors’ observations and propose new research avenues for land system scientists. Results: The pandemic’s effects have been unevenly distributed, context-specific, and dependent on the multiple connections that link land systems across the globe. Conclusions: We argue that the pandemic presents concurrent “natural experiments” that can advance our understanding of the intricate ways in which global shocks produce direct, indirect, and spillover effects on local and regional landscapes and land systems. These propagating shock effects disrupt existing connections, forge new connections, and re-establish former connections between peoples, landscapes, and land systems.

Climate-induced displacement is attracting increasing media, state, and scholarly attention, albeit often in a way that situates migration as either an example of climate adaptation or a failure thereof. Whether depicted as success or failure, both framings can invisibilize the preexisting socioenvironmental processes that render climate-induced migrations necessary—or, conversely, that can inhibit them entirely. Perspectives on displacement and environmental migration from within political ecology and human geography offer an alternative register, looking beyond unidirectional socioeconomic or environmental drivers to document how uneven development reproduces displacements relationally and historically. Drawing on these theorizations, as well as empirical research from agrarian Southeast Asia, this article develops the notion of cumulative socionatural displacements as one approach for conceptualizing socioecologically driven displacement in a world already on the move. We demonstrate this approach through an analysis of displacement in Southeast Asia that begins by tracing the evolving state, market, and agroecological relations that have made mobility integral to agrarian viability while setting the stage for more intense climate impacts. In doing so, we also center the long-term (nonclimatic) environmental changes that are often sidelined in both anthropocentric debates on rural displacements and climate doomsday scenarios. We argue that examining climate-induced migration as just one facet of cumulative socionatural displacements is necessary for overcoming the ontological and political impasses engendered by prevailing narratives that collapse climate migration into convenient but misleading binaries.