Chad Monfreda

Global Consequences of Land Use

Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air ...

Solutions for a cultivated planet

Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000

Agricultural activities have dramatically altered our planet's land surface. To understand the extent and spatial distribution of these changes, we have developed a new global d...

Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000

Croplands cover ∼15 million km 2 of the planet and provide the bulk of the food and fiber essential to human well‐being. Most global land cover data sets from satellites group c...

Trading carbon for food: Global comparison of carbon stocks vs. crop yields on agricultural land

Expanding croplands to meet the needs of a growing population, changing diets, and biofuel production comes at the cost of reduced carbon stocks in natural vegetation and soils....