This note presents the recent global development trends in soybean cultivation as derived from the FAO statistics. It focuses on the change over the course of the last thirty years, when significant new allocations of the global production have occurred, which have turned South America into a leading player on the global scale. It takes point of departure in a land change science approach and employs the notions of underlying and proximate drivers and teleconnections to characterize the process of land use change in relation to the accelerating use of land for soybean cultivation.

(2009). Land system science: handling complex series of natural and socio-economic processes. Journal of Land Use Science: Vol. 4, Lasys Workshop 2007: Land System Science – Handling Complex Series of Natural and Socio-Economic Processes, pp. 1-4.

The paper addresses the challenge of conceptualizing and analyzing complex change processes and causal explanations in human–environment systems. To illustrate this challenge empirically, the paper takes its point of departure in the apparent paradox that the agricultural practices in the desert fringe zone of the Sahel seem to remain remarkably unchanged despite huge and accelerating changes in major driving forces such as climate variations, population pressure, policies and market access. Such partly unexpected trends suggest that novel insight is needed into the human environment interactions that shape the use of land for cultivating purposes in this region. As a background for the paper’s conceptual discussion, recent developments in the Sahelian land use system are briefly described, using documentation from empirical case studies conducted in the northernmost region of Burkina Faso over the past 20 years. Specific attention is given to presenting (a) main trends in the transformation of the land use and livelihoods, (b) the co-evolution of possible driving forces that enables and constrains conditions for change and (c) characteristic trajectories of change. Inspired by the notions of process, temporal totality and inertia, the paper suggests employing a portfolio of complementary perspectives to investigate change processes. More precisely, four different conceptual lenses to analyze human–environment interaction are proposed and examined (the land change science framework, the double exposure notion, the system dynamics (SD) approach and coupled human–environmental timelines). Specific attention is given to the potential contribution of these respective lenses to enhancing our understanding of the land SD and to uncovering important causal relations. It is concluded that these conceptual lenses, in concert, can help to put process, in the sense of a sequence of successive stages, in the centre of our understanding of change and causal relationships in human–environmental systems.

The paper analyzes land use changes, notably cropland expansion, in SE-Niger from the mid-1980s to 2011. It scrutinizes land use trajectories and investigates how cultivation shifts between dune landscapes and valleys (bas-fonds) in response to climate, population pressure, and sociocultural opportunities, combining lenses rooted in land change science and the notions of double exposure and human-environmental timelines. Specifically, the interest is directed towards exploring the value of different methods of land use data harvesting. The importance of cropland expansion is assessed in two ways: by interpreting Landsat satellite images and by interviewing local people to obtain qualitative descriptions. The results demonstrate a glaring discrepancy between the assessed land use trends derived from these two data sources. Issues such as important developments in landscape priorities, allocation of cropland between dunes and valleys, possible land saturation, and adaptation to climate change or globalization are portrayed very differently. It is concluded that critical attention to data reliability is crucial to avoid misleading narratives in land change science, especially in places covered by sparse data.