Soils are essential to life on Earth but are rapidly degrading worldwide due to unsustainable human activities. We argue that soil degradation constitutes a key Earth system process that should be added to the planetary boundaries framework. Soils are essential to life on Earth but are rapidly degrading worldwide due to unsustainable human activities. We argue that soil degradation constitutes a key Earth system process that should be added to the planetary boundaries framework.

In seasonal environments, increasing spring temperatures lead many taxa to advance the timing of reproduction. Species that do not may suffer lower fitness. We investigated why black‐tailed godwits (Limosa limosa limosa), a ground‐breeding agricultural grassland shorebird, have not advanced timing of reproduction during the last three decades in the face of climate change and human‐induced habitat degradation. We used data from an 11‐year field study to parameterize an Integral Projection Model to predict how spring temperature and habitat quality simultaneously influence the timing of reproduction and population dynamics. We found apparent selection for earlier laying, but not a correlation between the laying dates of parents and their offspring. Nevertheless, in warmer springs, laying dates of adults show a stronger positive correlation with laying date in previous springs than in cooler ones, and this leads us to predict a slight advance in the timing of reproduction if spring temperatures continue to increase. We also show that only in landscapes with low agricultural activity, the population can continue to act as a source. This study shows how climate change and declining habitat quality may enhance extinction risk.

The increasing availability of high resolution and high frequency, radar‐based remote sensing data (i.e. observations on land surface characteristics, insensitive to cloud interference), makes it possible to track land‐use intensity more precisely at the whole landscape scale. Here, we develop a new radar‐based remote sensing technique for large‐scale quantification of agricultural land‐use intensity across human‐dominated landscapes. We compare the respective abilities of Sentinel‐1 C‐band radar (C‐SAR, C‐band synthetic aperture radar) remote sensing data with the more traditional optical data, asMODISenhanced vegetation indices (MODIS EVI), in capturing seasonality and the magnitude of land‐use intensity (quantity and frequency of biomass removal). Linking our novel radar‐based change detection algorithm to agricultural management activities on the ground, we quantify a whole landscape according to timing of mowing, a key grassland disturbance, thus capturing the dynamics of mowing regimes in grasslands. We found that the radar‐based proxy provides a rapid and reliable measure of land‐use intensity, reliably predicting plant community composition at the landscape scale. We tested this methodology using data on black‐tailed godwits (Limosa limosa limosa), a specialist breeder of lowland meadows which, over the last 50 years, has shown dramatic declines. During territory establishment, black‐tailed godwits preferentially used fields corresponding to intermediate radar‐sensed land‐use intensities. However, the present‐day timing of mowing in these habitats was such that most godwit broods were less likely to be successful than broods in grasslands used at a lower intensity. Synthesis and applications. The newly developed radar‐based land‐use intensity quantification is a powerful tool that makes it possible for ecologists and land managers to include agricultural land‐use intensity measurements in population studies of the plants, insects, birds and mammals using these landscapes, at the spatial scale of entire populations. Applications of this tool include evaluating the effectiveness of European agri‐environment schemes aiming to increase biodiversity through decreased land‐use intensity or expanding the quantification of agricultural land‐use intensity to other geographic regions.