While food and nutrition security are issues that national and international organizations are tackling, one of the central problems often overlooked is the essential role of soils in providing nutritious food. Soils are the base for food production and food security. However, the majority of soils are in fair and poor conditions, with the most significant threats being erosion and loss of nutrients. In this study, we estimate the potential of soil loss, agricultural productivity loss, and nutrient loss for Brazil’s most important agricultural region, the Brazilian Cerrado, for the years 2000 and 2012. For this, we applied the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) model integrated with a geographical information system (GIS) to estimate annual soil loss rate and agricultural productivity loss, and used total nitrogen and total phosphorus in soil to estimate the annual nutrient loss rate caused by soil loss. All model factors and data were obtained from the literature. The results show that agricultural expansion in the Brazilian Cerrado is increasing the area of severe erosion, occasioning agricultural productivity decrease and soil nutrient depletion. The annual soil loss rate increased from 10.4 (2000) to 12.0 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ (2012). Agricultural productivity loss occurred in more than 3 million hectares of crops and silviculture in 2000 and in more than 5.5 million hectares in 2012. Severely eroded areas lost between 13.1 and 25.9 times more nutrients than areas with low and moderate soil loss rates. These findings show that government policy should be directed to ensure the sustainable use of soils, mainly in agriculturally consolidated regions of the Brazilian Cerrado.

Strong El Niño events alter tropical climates and may lead to a negative carbon balance in tropical forests and consequently a disruption to the global carbon cycle. The complexity of tropical forests and the lack of data from these regions hamper the assessment of the spatial distribution of El Niño impacts on these ecosystems. Typically, maps of climate anomaly are used to detect areas of greater risk, ignoring baseline climate conditions and forest cover. Here, we integrated climate anomalies from the 1982–1983, 1997–1998, and 2015–2016 El Niño events with baseline climate and forest edge extent, using a risk assessment approach to hypothetically assess the spatial and temporal distributions of El Niño risk over tropical forests under several risk scenarios. The drivers of risk varied temporally and spatially. Overall, the relative risk of El Niño has been increasing driven mainly by intensified forest fragmentation that has led to a greater chance of fire ignition and increased mean annual air temperatures. We identified areas of repeated high risk, where conservation efforts and fire control measures should be focused to avoid future forest degradation and negative impacts on the carbon cycle.

Agricultural systems play a key role in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals, established by the United Nations, given the current challenge of producing enough food to feed a global population that is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050. More efficient and sustainable use of nutrients in agriculture is an important step to increasing production while minimizing threats to natural ecosystems and resource depletion. In this study, we developed a system nutrient balance for nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) to evaluate nutrient use practices in cropping and grazing systems in the Vermelho River watershed (VRW), Upper Pantanal, Brazil, and investigated options to improve N and P use efficiency (NUE and PUE). Our results show P balance in cropping systems are positive while those in grazing systems tend to be negative. The positive values in cropping systems are due to both high P inputs from mineral fertilizers and high soil P‐sorbing capacities. The negative values in grazing systems are a result of the removal of animal products without replacing the nutrients. Most of the N inputs in the crops grown in this region come from biological nitrogen fixation. The NUE in cropping systems is about 0.95, which is higher than the upper critical value of the desirable range (0.6–0.9). Given the high NUE value and the risk of soil mining, improving cropping systems NUE by adjusting the inputs to replenish N outputs and avoid soil erosion in the VRW are of considerable interest.

Landslides have a high degree of uncertainty requiring new methods for their analysis, monitoring and forecasting. In Brazil, Cemaden is responsible for actions related to the natural disasters and, recently, has started with partner institutions, a project sponsored by FINEP in order to monitor ten prone-landslides areas situated in different regions of the country. This paper presents the proposal of REDEGEO to implant a laboratory of modeling and geovisualization to study landslide processes in urbanized areas. The laboratory consists of three parts: A) Field surveys to obtain high resolution images from unmanned aerial vehicles and to obtain the internal geometry of outcrops from geophysics methods (Resistivity and Radar Soil Penetration - GPR); B) 3D modeling using the software Geovisionary® which allows the analysis of image and geophysical dataset from different formats considering their volumetric properties; C) Geovisualization and Virtual Reality (VR) where the images obtained in the fieldwork can be observed from a human-machine interface which allows that the researchers have a full immersion in the selected areas. The creation of a laboratory related to the natural disasters, which include geovisualization and VR, stimulates the active participation of the researcher team and creates mechanisms for the participation of technologies developers, managers, civil defense agents and even the population that lives in the risk prone-areas.