Christian Levers

• Dr.
• PostDoc Position at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ & University of British Columbia

Agroecological and technological innovations are two important approaches in the transition towards agricultural sustainability. We lack knowledge about how current agricultural contexts may influence future development pathways and the relative importance of the two approaches. This study explores the alignment between past uptake of agroecologica...

European agriculture must transform to confront the many challenges it faces, yet there are different sets of values that may underpin future agricultural change. However, we currently lack thorough understanding of the implications of operationalising these plural values for European land systems. In this article, we apply the IPBES Nature Futures...

Agricultural expansion and intensification are major drivers of global biodiversity loss, endangering natural habitats and ecosystem functions, such as pollination. In this study, we analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of avocado frontier expansion and intensification from 2011 to 2019 and assess their effects on landscape connectivity, focusing on...

CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit and det...

Context Anthropogenic landscape change is an important driver shaping our environment. Historical landscape analysis contributes to the monitoring and understanding of these change processes. Such analyses are often focused on specific spatial scales and single research methods, thus covering only limited aspects of landscape change. Objectives He...

Commodity agriculture continues to spread into tropical dry forests globally, eroding their social-ecological integrity. Understanding where deforestation frontiers expand, and which impacts this process triggers, is thus important for sustainability planning. We reconstructed past land-system change (1985–2015) and simulated alternative land-syste...

Halting and reversing the ongoing insect decline requires in-depth knowledge on key drivers. Due to their sensitivity to habitat quality, butterflies are valuable indicators for grassland management intensity, including mowing. However, most studies examining mowing regime impacts on butterflies are limited to small spatial extents. Here, we tested...

1. CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with the environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit...

Current agricultural practices in Europe are increasingly aggravating societal and environmental safety concerns. This creates social and regulatory pressures on farmers, which can lead to declining material and social status of farmers, farmer discontent, and anti-regulation protests. These tensions are rooted in conflicting value systems for agri...

European agri-food systems must overcome structural lock-ins to achieve more sustainable modes of production and consumption. Yet European regions are highly diverse, and we lack understanding of how different regional characteristics may enable or inhibit sustainability transitions. This hinders the development of context-tailored governance strat...

Agricultural simplification continues to expand at the expense of more diverse forms of agriculture. This simplification, for example, in the form of intensively managed monocultures, poses a risk to keeping the world within safe and just Earth system boundaries. Here, we estimated how agricultural diversification simultaneously affects social and...

Agricultural intensification has simplified landscape composition and configuration, which has led to biodiversity declines. Increasing landscape‐wide crop heterogeneity can promote farmland biodiversity. However, knowledge is still lacking on how the effects of configurational and compositional crop heterogeneity (i.e. field size and crop diversit...

Sustainable intensification (SI) responds to the concurrent challenges of increasing food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. As an early disclosure of innovation, patents are a useful indicator of technology market potential. However, we lack understanding of the extent to which current agricultural technology paten...

Agricultural systems support societies in various ways but also cause substantial sustainability challenges. Sustainable agricultural practices are key to achieving sustainability targets, yet we lack generalizable knowledge on why farmers apply such practices. Here, we quantified the relationship between farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultur...

Farming in Europe has been the scene of several important socio-economic and environmental developments and crises throughout the last century. Therefore, an understanding of the historical driving forces of farm change helps identifying potentials for navigating future pathways of agricultural development. However, long-term driving forces have so...

Farmers are at the centre of scientific and political debates about sustainability in European agriculture, but rarely do we discuss the roles of other actors who shape their behaviour. Understanding the interactions and balance of power in agri-food systems is critical to effectively govern sustainability transitions. Here, we conduct a meta-study...

Agroecology is increasingly recognized as a pathway for agricultural transformation that can mitigate environmental harms and improve social equity. Yet, the lack of broad-scale assessments that track agroecological indicators in distinct contexts has been identified as a challenge to scaling agroecology out and up. Here, we identify and assess ind...

Advances in Land System Science (LSS) rely on the evidence generated by different types of research activities, including place-based case studies, landscape/land-system mapping and synthesis research. However, these activities are usually conducted in parallel, with a lack of integration often leading to important knowledge gaps and limitations. I...

Farming systems that support locally diverse agricultural production and high levels of biodiversity are in rapid decline, despite evidence of their benefits for climate, environmental health, and food security. Yet, agricultural policies, financial incentives, and market concentration increasingly constrain the viability of diversified farming sys...

As ambitious new targets to increase area-based conservation are discussed, there is a growing concern that such an expansion might ignore or marginalize local people. How to set top-down priorities to implement new protected areas that reconcile local peoples' interaction with and dependence on biodiversity remains a challenge. The Gran Chaco, a g...

Habitat destruction and overexploitation are the main threats to biodiversity and where they co-occur, their combined impact is often larger than their individual one. Yet, detailed knowledge of the spatial footprints of these threats is lacking, including where they overlap and how they change over time. These knowledge gaps are real barriers for...

Agriculture plays a central role in achieving most Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sustainable intensification (SI) of agriculture has been proposed as a promising concept for safeguarding global food security, while simultaneously protecting the environment and promoting good quality of life. However, SI often leads to context-specific susta...

It has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic affected some agricultural systems more than others, and even within geographic regions, not all farms were affected to the same extent. To build resilience of agricultural systems to future shocks, it is key to understand which farms were affected and why. In this study, we examined farmers' perceived r...

Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear, which is hampered by a lackof spatially and temporally detailed reconstruction of agricultural expansion. Her...

A range of intensifying pressures is making the future of European agriculture dynamic and contested. Insights into these pressures are needed to inform debates about the future of the sector. In this study, we use a foresight approach to identify, quantify and map megatrends. Megatrends are long-term driving forces which are observable today and w...

Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and polic...

Humans place strong pressure on land and have modified around 75% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. In this context, ecoregions and biomes, merely defined on the basis of their biophysical features, are incomplete characterizations of the territory. Land system science requires classification schemes that incorporate both social and biophysical dimen...

Hunting is a widespread but often overlooked land-use activity, providing major benefits to society. Hunting takes place in most landscapes, yet it remains unclear which types of landscapes foster or dampen hunting-related services, and how hunting relates to other land uses. A better understanding of these relationships is key for sustainable land...

The surging demand for commodity crops has led to rapid and severe agricultural frontier expansion globally and has put producing regions increasingly under pressure. However, knowledge about spatial patterns of agricultural frontier dynamics, their leading spatial determinants, and socio-ecological trade-offs is often lacking, hindering contextual...

Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear. Here, we developed and mapped a novel set of metrics that quantify agricultural frontier processes at unprece...

Significance Millions of people globally rely on forest-based resources for their livelihoods, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. Deforestation is often hypothesized to diminish forest-dependent communities’ resource base and to push them toward more-marginal environments, but such ecological marginalization has rarely been quantified. We...

Archetype analysis is a key tool in landscape and sustainability research to organize social-ecological complexity and to identify social-ecological systems (SESs). While inductive archetype analysis can characterize the diversity of SESs within a region, deductively derived archetypes have greater interpretative power to compare across regions. He...

Agriculture is a major threat to global biodiversity. A common claim is that large‐scale agro‐industrial farming is mainly responsible for the biodiversity decline, while smaller family farms are more wildlife friendly. Here we leverage a natural experiment along the former inner German border to estimate the causal impact of farm size on biodivers...

Strong trade-offs between agriculture and the environment occur in deforestation frontiers, particularly in the world's rapidly disappearing tropical and subtropical dry forests. Pathways to mitigate these trade-offs are often unclear, as well as how deforestation or different policies alter the option space of available pathways. Using a spatial o...

Strong trade-offs between agriculture and the environment occur in deforestation frontiers, particularly in the world’s rapidly disappearing tropical and subtropical dry forests. Pathways to mitigate these trade-offs are often unclear, as well as how deforestation or different policies alter the option space of available pathways. Using a spatial o...

Big data and mobile technology are widely claimed to be global disruptive forces in agriculture that benefit small-scale farmers. Yet the access of small-scale farmers to this technology is poorly understood. We show that only 24–37% of farms of <1 ha in size are served by third generation (3G) or 4G services, compared to 74–80% of farms of >200 ha...

Where agriculture expands into tropical and subtropical forests, social–ecological impacts are typically strong. However, where and how frontier development impacts on ecosystem functioning and services is often unclear, including which services trade‐off against agricultural production. This constitutes a major barrier towards planning for more su...

Habitat destruction and overexploitation are the main threats to biodiversity and where they co‐occur, their combined impact is often larger than their individual one. Yet, detailed knowledge of the spatial footprints of these threats is lacking, including where they overlap and how they change over time. These knowledge gaps are real barriers for...

The increasing number of wind farms for energy production raises concerns about their effects on wildlife and particularly on birds. To date it is unclear whether models that combine data on wind turbine densities and habitat suitability can explain the actual spatial occurrence of collision fatalities and how well these models perform in compariso...

The globalisation of agriculture is evident in the rising volumes and values of internationally traded agricultural products. Export growth has led to increasingly commercialised agricultural production, particularly in regions where a large share of produce is exported. However, the increasing share of exports in global agriculture has led to adve...

World‐wide, tropical savannas and dry forests are under increasing pressure from land use. The environmental impacts of agricultural expansion into these ecosystems have received much attention, yet subtler changes in natural vegetation remain severely understudied. We explored how bird communities vary along gradients of woody vegetation in the So...

Agricultural expansion threatens biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In the Gran Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot, rampant cropland and pasture expansion raise concerns about the sustainability of these land-use changes. Zoning policies were recently enacted in the Argentine Chaco to balance agriculture and conservation, yet th...

Tropical dry forests and savannas provide important ecosystem services and harbor high biodiversity, yet are globally under pressure from land-use change. Mapping changes in the condition of dry forests and savannas is therefore critical. This can be challenging given that these ecosystems are characterized by continuous gradients of tree and shrub...

Context Understanding habitat selection can be challenging for species surviving in small populations, but is needed for landscape-scale conservation planning. Objectives We assessed how European bison (Bison bonasus) habitat selection, and particularly forest use, varies across subpopulations and spatial scales. Methods We gathered the most comp...

Agricultural abandonment is widespread and growing in many regions worldwide, often because of agricultural intensification on productive lands, conservation policies, or the spatial decoupling of agricultural production from consumption. Abandonment has major environmental and social impacts, which differ starkly depending on the geographical cont...

The world's grasslands, both natural and managed, provide food and many non-provisioning ecosystem services. Although most grasslands today are used for livestock grazing or fodder production, little is known about the spatial patterns of grassland management intensity, especially at broad geographic scales. Using the European Union as a case study...

Aim Primary forests have high conservation value but are rare in Europe due to historic land use. Yet many primary forest patches remain unmapped, and it is unclear to what extent they are effectively protected. Our aim was to (1) compile the most comprehensive European‐scale map of currently known primary forests, (2) analyse the spatial determina...

A growing human population and shifting consumption patterns increase the pressure on agricultural production systems. Reservoir-based irrigation has generally boosted agricultural production through higher cropping frequencies, whereas the magnitude of this effect varies significantly across the globe. Technological, biophysical and socio-economic...

Cultural landscapes are valued for their landscape character and cultural heritage. Yet, these often low-intensity, multifunctional landscapes are at risk of disappearance. Understanding how cultural landscapes might change under alternative futures is important for identifying where to target actions towards persistence of cultural landscapes. Thi...

Explorations of future land use change are important to understand potential conflicts between competing land uses, trade-offs associated with particular land change trajectories, and the effectiveness of policies to steer land systems into desirable states. Most model-based explorations and scenario studies focused on conversions in broad land use...

Assessments of land-system change have dominantly focused on conversions among broad land-use categories, whereas intensity changes within these categories have received less attention. Considering that both modes of land change typically result in diverse patterns and trajectories of land-system change, there is a need to develop approaches to red...

Aim Land‐use change is considered a major threat to biodiversity. Species–area relationships ( SAR s), which are often used to assess biodiversity changes, assume that land use leads to the loss of natural habitats. Yet, in regions with long land‐use histories, such as Europe, many species have persisted in, or even depend on, landscapes heavily in...

The global demand for agricultural products will increase in the 21st century, unless major transformations in consumptive behaviour occur. To a large extent, production increases in agriculture will depend on intensifying existing agricultural systems. Yet, our understanding of what determines the spatial patterns of agricultural intensity and cha...

In this chapter, we define, conceptualize, and exemplify competition for ecosystem services derived from land. Competition for land-based ecosystem services arises when utilization of an ecosystem service by one actor reduces the possibility of other actors to use the same or other ecosystem services. Therefore, we focus on trade-offs and synergies...

Assessing changes in the extent and management intensity of land use is crucial to understanding land-system dynamics and their environmental and social outcomes. Yet, changes in the spatial patterns of land management intensity, and thus how they might relate to changes in the extent of land uses, remains unclear for many world regions. We compile...

Die Nutzung von terrestrischen Ökosystemen zur Befriedigung der Grundbedürfnisse der Menschheit hat tiefgreifende Auswirkungen auf das Erdsystem und führte zur Ausprägung von anthropogen dominierten Landsystemen. Diese sind von hoher Komplexität, da sie aus einer Vielzahl von unterschiedlichsten Einflussfaktoren angetriebenen Landnutzungsveränderun...

Global agricultural production will likely need to increase in the future due to population growth, changing diets, and the rising importance of bioenergy. Intensifying already existing cropland is often considered more sustainable than converting more natural areas. Unfortunately, our understanding of cropping patterns and intensity is weak, espec...

Agricultural abandonment (AA) is a significant land use process in the European Union (EU) and modeling its driving factors has great scientific and policy interest. Past studies of drivers of AA in Europe have been limited by their restricted geographic regions and their use of traditional statistical methods, which fail to consider the spatial va...

#################################################################################### THIS DATA PACKAGE ACCOMPANIES: Verkerk PJ, Levers C, Kuemmerle T, Lindner M, Valbuena R, Verburg PH, Zudin S (2015) Mapping wood production in European forests. Forest Ecology and Management 357:228-238. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2015.08.007 Please...

Wood production is an important forest use, impacting a range of other ecosystem services. However, information on the spatial patterns in wood production is limited and often available only for larger administrative units. In this study, we developed high-resolution wood production maps for European forests. We collected wood production statistics...

AimLand-use change is the single biggest cause of biodiversity loss. With a rising demand for resources, understanding how and where agriculture threatens biodiversity is of increasing importance. Agricultural expansion has received much attention, but where high agricultural land-use intensity (LUI) threatens biodiversity remains unclear. We addre...

We compared the effectiveness of environmental variables, and in particular of land-use indicators, to explain species richness patterns across taxonomic groups and biogeographical scales (i.e. overall pan-Europe and ecoregions within pan-Europe). Using boosted regression trees that handle non-linear relationships, we compared the relative influenc...

Understanding patterns, dynamics, and drivers of land use is crucial for improving our ability to cope with sustainability challenges. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework provides a set of integrated socio-ecological indicators that quantify how land use alters energy flows in ecosystems via land conversions and biom...

Scattered trees support high levels of farmland biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, but they are threatened by agricultural intensification, urbanization, and land abandonment. This study aimed to map and quantify the decline of orchard meadows (scattered fruit trees of high nature conservation value) for a region in Sou...

Subsurface flow and heat transport near Freienbrink, NE Germany, was simulated in order to study groundwater–surface water exchange between a floodplains aquifer and a section of the lowland River Spree and an adjacent oxbow. Groundwater exfiltration was the dominant process, and only fast surface water level rises resulted in temporary infiltratio...

Future increases in land-based production will need to focus more on sustainably intensifying existing production systems. Unfortunately, our understanding of the global patterns of land use intensity is weak, partly because land use intensity is a complex, multidimensional term, and partly because we lack appropriate datasets to assess land use in...

Historic increase in urban population numbers in the face of shrinking urban economies and declining social services has meant that a large proportion of the urban population lives in precarious urban conditions, which provide the grounds for high urban health risks in low income countries. This study aims to identify, investigate, and contrast the...

Water exchange processes in the floodplain of a lowland groundwater-surface water system are studied on the basis of a study site near Freienbrink, NE Germany. The surface water boundaries of this site are formed by an oxbow and the current bed of the river Spree, section Müggelspree. Surface and ground water levels and water temperatures were coll...