Jonathan A. Foley

A safe operating space for humanity

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 ...

Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity

"Anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. We propose a new approach to global sustain...

Impact of regional climate change on human health

The World Health Organisation estimates that the warming and precipitation trends due to anthropogenic climate change of the past 30 years already claim over 150,000 lives annua...

Solutions for a cultivated planet

Estimating historical changes in global land cover: Croplands from 1700 to 1992

Human activities over the last three centuries have significantly transformed the Earth's environment, primarily through the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. Thi...

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...

Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s

Global demand for agricultural products such as food, feed, and fuel is now a major driver of cropland and pasture expansion across much of the developing world. Whether these n...

The global distribution of cultivable lands: current patterns and sensitivity to possible climate change

Abstract Aim This study makes quantitative global estimates of land suitability for cultivation based on climate and soil constraints. It evaluates further the sensitivity of cr...

Amazonia revealed: forest degradation and loss of ecosystem goods and services in the Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is one of the world's most important bioregions, harboring a rich array of plant and animal species and offering a wealth of goods and services to society. For ...

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....