David L Lopez-Carr

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Geography

Artificial nighttime lights can adversely impact animal behavior, particularly in nocturnal species. Evidence shows that bats can become inactive due to night lights and may avoid trees bathed in such light, consequently decreasing nocturnal pollination frequency. Although numerous biological studies have been conducted to understand the alteration...

With great excitement and pride, I introduce the inaugural issue of Populations, a new research journal dedicated to advancing our understanding of population dynamics and its interactions with socio-economic, political, and environmental processes [...]

Understanding patterns in forest cover change (FCC) is urgently needed to support government policies aimed at long-term sustainable forest management. Because of the struggle against forest loss, the Zagros forests (ZFs), which cover 3.5% of Iran's total land area, have been subjected to conservation policies. However, little is known about the ef...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected farmworkers in the United States and Europe, leading to increased morbidity and mortality. However, little is known about the specific impact of the pandemic on agriculture and food production workers in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of...

Many communities in low- and middle-income countries globally lack sustainable, cost-effective and mutually beneficial solutions for infectious disease, food, water and poverty challenges, despite their inherent interdependence1–7. Here we provide support for the hypothesis that agricultural development and fertilizer use in West Africa increase th...

Addressing the global challenges of desertification, land degradation, and drought (DLDD), and their impacts on achieving sustainable development goals for coupled human-environmental systems is a key component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In particular, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15.3 aims to, “by 2030, combat desertific...

The factors influencing the incidence of COVID‐19, including the impact of the vaccination programs, have been studied in the literature. Most studies focus on one or two factors, without considering their interactions, which is not enough to assess a vaccination program in a statistically robust manner. We examine the impact of the U.S. vaccinatio...

The cover image is based on the Research Article Operationalizing an integrative socio‐ecological framework in support of global monitoring of land degradation by Narcisa G. Pricope et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.4447. The cover image is based on the Research Article Operationalizing an integrative socio‐ecological framework in support of glob...

Forest nationalization policies in developing countries have often led to a reduction in local forest ownership rights and short- or long-term exploitative behaviors of stakeholders. The purpose of this research is to quantify the effect of Iran’s Forest Nationalization Law (FNL) in a part of Zagros Forest over a 68-year time period (1955–2022) usi...

Use of agrochemicals, including insecticides, is vital to food production and predicted to increase 2-5 fold by 2050. Previous studies have shown a positive association between agriculture and the human infectious disease schistosomiasis, which is problematic as this parasitic disease infects approximately 250 million people worldwide. Certain inse...

Background Billions of people living in poverty are at risk of environmentally mediated infectious diseases—that is, pathogens with environmental reservoirs that affect disease persistence and control and where environmental control of pathogens can reduce human risk. The complex ecology of these diseases creates a global health problem not easily...

Despite sustained global efforts to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation, estimates of land degradation nationally and regionally vary considerably. Land degradation reduces agricultural productivity, impacts the provision of vital ecosystem services, and disproportionately affects vulnerable populations. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Deve...

Currently, there is an extensive literature examining heat impacts on labor productivity and health, as well as a recent surge in research around COVID-19. However, to our knowledge, no research to date examines the dual burden of COVID-19 and extreme heat on labor productivity and laborers' health and livelihoods. To close this research gap and sh...

Identifying key ecological nodes/corridors and priority restoration areas (KENPRA) is the key link for optimizing land use and ecological security patterns (ESPs). However, few studies have considered future land use/cover change (LUCC) and urban sprawl in identifying KENPRA for ESP maintenance. To optimize KENPRA, we took Quanjiao County, Anhui Pr...

Water has always been a driver of human mobility, migration, and displacement. But water is increasingly central to explaining environmental migration in the context of climate change. Most studies of the relationship between water and environmental migration are framed around punctuated, extreme weather events and disasters that either limit agric...

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) contain more tropical high-biodiversity forest than the remaining areas of the planet combined, yet experienced more than a third of global deforestation during the first decade of the 21st century. While drivers of forest change occur at multiple scales, we examined forest change at the municipal and national...

Despite sustained global efforts to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation, estimates of land degradation nationally and regionally vary considerably. Land degradation reduces agricultural productivity, impacts the provision of vital ecosystem services, and disproportionately affects vulnerable populations. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Deve...

Background Water resources development promotes agricultural expansion and food security. But are these benefits offset by increased infectious disease risk? Dam construction on the Senegal River in 1986 was followed by agricultural expansion and increased transmission of human schistosomes. Yet the mechanisms linking these two processes at the ind...

Coal resources have always been an important driving force for macroeconomic growth and GDP growth in resource-rich regions. However, this growth has also caused inequality of household income in developing regions. Using survey data on rural household livelihoods in Shenmu county, Shaanxi Province, in northwestern China, this paper analyzes the re...

Forest conversion for agriculture is the most expansive signature of human occupation on the Earth’s surface. This paper develops a conceptual model of factors underlying frontier agricultural expansion—the predominant driver of deforestation worldwide—from the perspective of small farm households—the majority of farmers globally. The framework con...

We determined protected area coverage and woody vegetation change in Latin America and the Caribbean at biome and ecoregion scales, for the years 2001 to 2010. For each ecoregion’s terrestrial protected area (TPA) and unprotected area, a linear regression of woody vegetation area against time (10 years) was used to estimate 2001 and 2010 woody vege...

Background Infectious disease risk is driven by three interrelated components: exposure, hazard, and vulnerability. For schistosomiasis, exposure occurs through contact with water, which is often tied to daily activities. Water contact, however, does not imply risk unless the environmental hazard of snails and parasites is also present in the water...

This report was produced as an output of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)-funded project “Strengthening Land Degradation Neutrality data and decision-making through free and open access platforms”. For additional information on the project see https://www.tools4ldn.org/. This project is a collaboration of Conservation International, Bern Unive...

Background The risk of infectious diseases, including snail-borne schistosomiasis, is determined by three inter-related components: exposure, hazard, and vulnerability. For schistosomiasis, exposure occurs through behaviours involving water contact, but not without the environmental hazard of snails and parasites in the water. Socioeconomic vulnera...

This report was produced as an output of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)-funded project “Strengthening Land Degradation Neutrality data and decision-making through free and open access platforms”. For additional information on the project see https://www.tools4ldn.org/. This project is a collaboration of Conservation International, Bern Unive...

Dams enable the production of food and renewable energy, making them a crucial tool for both economic development and climate change adaptation in low- and middle-income countries. However, dams may also disrupt traditional livelihood systems and increase the transmission of vector- and water-borne pathogens. These livelihood and health impacts dim...

The ecosystem services concept has emerged as a guiding principle in natural resource management over the past two decades, and an ecosystem services approach to management is currently mandated as a core element of United States National Forest planning. However, the concept of ecosystem services has been interpreted and operationalized in a varie...

Use of agrochemicals, including insecticides, is vital to food production and predicted to increase 2-5 fold by 2050. Previous studies have shown a positive association between agriculture and the human infectious disease schistosomiasis, which is problematic as this parasitic disease infects approximately 250 million people worldwide. Certain inse...

Significance Here, we show how a conservation–health care exchange in rural Borneo preserved globally important forest carbon and simultaneously improved human health and well-being, in a region of historically intense environmental destruction, widespread poverty, and unmet health needs. To evaluate this long-term conservation and health intervent...

Subsistence fishing is almost exclusively recognized within rural, indigenous and Native fishing traditions; yet research indicates many underprivileged, non-indigenous urban communities also derive social, nutritional, and cultural benefits from coastal resources. In California, pier fishers are an often overlooked and potentially vulnerable commu...

In defining cultural ecosystem services as the recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits people obtain from ecosystems, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment conveyed a key aspect of nature-society relationships. Yet, it is reasonable to suppose that this aspect may apply more to to contexts where people enjoy more leisure time to admire a scen...

Resettlement of local people from protected areas (PAs) has been regarded as a preferred method to alleviate human disturbance and environmental pressure. Lack of knowledge about local communities' perceptions of resettlement, however, can lead to failed relocation projects and negative impacts on environmental sustainability and livelihoods. To be...

OBJECTIVE The primary objectives of this study are to examine intra-urban spatial variation in the rates of under-five-years-old child mortality (5q0) in Accra in 2000 and 2010, as well as between those two dates, and to evaluate potential connections between the physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods and their levels of child mortality. M...

This project examines the relationship between migration, population, and economic processes, and forest cover change in Mexico from 2001 to 2010. Using multiple regression analyses with remotely-sensed, significant (p < 0.10) change in woody vegetation from 2001 to 2010 as our dependent variable, we explore how environmental, migration, demographi...

Changes in precipitation patterns may have deleterious effects on population health. We used data from the Uganda National Panel Survey from 2009-2012 (n = 3,223 children contributing 5,013 assessments) to evaluate the link between rainfall and undernutrition in children under age 5. We considered three outcomes (underweight, wasting, and stunting)...

Human schistosomiasis is a snail-borne parasitic disease affecting more than 200 million people worldwide. Direct contact with snail-infested freshwater is the primary route of exposure. Water management infrastructure, including dams and irrigation schemes, expands snail habitat, increasing the risk across the landscape. The Diama Dam, built on th...

Rapid population and economic growth quickly degrade and deplete forest resources in many developing countries, even within protected areas. Monitoring forest cover change is critical for assessing ecosystem changes and targeting conservation efforts. Yet the most biodiverse forests on the planet are also the most difficult to monitor remotely due...

Marine justice is presented as a bridging concept and opportunity for scholars, activists, and policy-makers to combine differing methods of knowledge production and communication to promote and deepen justice in an era of global environmental change, sea level rise, overfishing, ocean acidification, and other coastal and marine issues. We open wit...

Although ecosystem service (ES) approaches are showing promise in moving environmental decision-making processes toward better outcomes for ecosystems and people, ES modeling (i.e., tools that estimate the supply of nature's benefits given biophysical constraints) and valuation methods (i.e., tools to understand people's demand for nature's benefit...

Although ecosystem service (ES) approaches are showing promise in moving environmental decision-making processes toward better outcomes for ecosystems and people, ES modeling (i.e., tools that estimate the supply of nature's benefits given biophysical constraints) and valuation methods (i.e., tools to understand people's demand for nature's benefits)...

Human population, its number and distribution on our planet, has a seemingly direct linkage to how much food we consume and how we practice agriculture. How this population-food-environment interface manifests across the globe is complex, non-linear, and both local-and scale-dependent. This essay is an overview of the population-food-environment ne...

This study investigates land ownership turnover in an area that is a priority conservation zone, the Sierra del Lacandón National Park (SLNP), Petén, Guatemala. Migration to Petén since the 1950s has eliminated 60% of Petén's forests. We analyze panel-data consisting of household interviews conducted with subsistence farmers living in the SLNP or i...

Despite increasing biophysical and anthropogenic threats to Caribbean island ecosystems, relatively few studies have used remote sensing to estimate rates of land use/cover change (LUCC) for Caribbean Islands. Mangroves provide vital protection to Caribbean island coastline, substantial economic benefit, and crucial habitat for surrounding reef eco...

Do Population-Health-Environment (PHE) initiatives provide synergies above and beyond more traditional singular efforts? Some development practitioners note the potential to combine solutions to population-environment (PE) together with health-environment (HE) initiatives for the global conservation of natural resources in developing countries whil...

Dams have long been associated with elevated burdens of human schistosomiasis, but how dams increase disease is not always clear, in part because dams have many ecological and socio-economic effects. A recent hypothesis argues that dams block reproduction of the migratory river prawns that eat the snail hosts of schistosomiasis. In the Senegal Rive...

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest levels of fertility in the world, despite rapid urban growth in most nations of the region. While there are many reasons for the fact that fertility decline is slow in Africa, we hypothesize that the relationship between fertility and urbanization is obscured by the fact that urbanization takes place along a gradi...

Background Dams have long been associated with increased burdens of human schistosomiasis, but how dams increase disease is not always clear, in part because dams have many ecological and socioeconomic effects. A recent hypothesis argues that dams block the reproduction of the migratory river prawns that eat the snail hosts of schistosomiasis. In t...

Migration necessarily precedes deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers. Therefore, identifying individual, household and place characteristics (demographic, political, social, economic, and ecological) related to this process is crucial for understanding the drivers of tropical deforestation. This will in turn be useful for developing poli...

Humans and the ecosystem services they depend on are threatened by climate change. Places with high or growing human population as well as increasing climate variability, have a reduced ability to provide ecosystem services just as the need for these services is most critical. A spiral of vulnerability and ecosystem degradation often ensues in such...

Summarized biome, hotspots, and G200 data. (XLSX)

We examine the effects of completing ‘serious game’ and computer-based learning assignments upon learning outcomes for undergraduate university students in an introductory human geography class (n = 177). The students completed one of the two experimental assignments as well as a control assignment that did not involve gaming, gathering data, or a...

Despite implications for both humans and the environment, a scant body of research examines fertility in forest frontiers. This study examines the fertility–environment association using empirical data from Ecuadorian Amazon between 1980 and 1999. Fertility dramatically declined during this period, and our empirical models suggest that households’...

In Sub-Saharan Africa rapid urban growth combined with rising poverty is creating diverse urban environments, the nature of which are not adequately captured by a simple urban-rural dichotomy. This paper proposes an alternative classification scheme for urban mapping based on a gradient approach for the southern portion of the West African country...

Despite growing research into the socio-economic aspects of vulnerability [1] – [4] , relatively little work has linked population dynamics with climate change beyond the complex relationship between migration and climate change [5] . It is likely, however, that most people experience climate change in situ , so understanding the role of pop...

Las ciudades latinoamericanas crecen y la calidad y el área per cápita de sus parques se reducen, respecto al estudio de esta situación, insumo fundamental para el diseño de políticas públicas urbanas, existen vacíos. La hipótesis nula para este trabajo es que en Tunja los parques urbanos no presentan una adecuada ni homogénea oferta y dotación. En...

Latin-American cities are growing while the quantity and quality of parks per capita shrinks. Also, there is a gap in the research, which needs to be filled in order to address urban public policy concerns. Our null hypothesis is that Tunja urban parks provide inadequate and unequal access and infrastructure. A census of the city's parks took place...

This study examines landscape changes in the context of China's national Grain for Green (GFG) policy, one of the world's largest "payment for environmental/ecosystem services" (PES) programs. We explored landscape structures and dynamics between 2000 and 2010 in Shaanxi Province, the Chinese province with the greatest amount of cropland conversion...

The sample numbers of the different land use types used to assess the accuracy for 548 Shaanxi Province

The equations and a brief explanation of the meaning of each metric at the landscape 550 and class levels.

Despite growing research into the socioeconomic aspects of vulnerability [1-3], relatively little work has linked population dynamics with climate change. Understanding the role of population dynamics remains critical. How a given number of people, in a given location and with varying population characteristics may exacerbate or mitigate the impact...

Integrating the analysis of natural and social systems to achieve sustainability has been an international scientific goal for years (1, 2). However, full integration has proven challenging, especially in regard to the role of culture (3), which is often missing from the complex sustainability equation. To enact policies and practices that can achi...

Analyzing the interaction between environmental policies and farmers’ responses to them is an important dimension to understand regional agro-ecosystem sustainability. We examine land-use outcomes of perhaps the largest government-planned rural reforestation program in the history of humankind, China’s “Grain for Green” (GFG) policy from 1999 to 20...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) hold great promise as an effective conservation tool, but the potential negative socioeconomic impacts of MPAs remain poorly understood. Indeed, little work has been done to advance the frameworks and methods needed to assess, measure, and communicate the potential negative socioeconomic impact of MPAs and incorporate...

The management of marine resources is a politically and culturally driven process, shaped by human livelihoods and perceptions, where notions of both space and place shape policies and decision-making in fundamental ways. An emerging sub-field within geography critically explores geographic aspects of marine resource management. However, there has...

In April 2003, California established a network of no-take marine protected areas (MPAs) around the northern Channel Islands located within the Santa Barbara Bight. Prior to the MPAs enclosing 17% of the islands' lobster fishing grounds, 25 commercial lobster fishermen caught 50% of the regional annual landings from the Channel Islands. To best man...

In an era of an increasingly diverse national population, researchers have had to turn to expanded models of public health promotion. In 2009, the University of California established the UC Global Health Institute with three Centers of Expertise. The Center of Expertise on Migration and Health (COEMH) formed with the multidisciplinary mission of t...

Governments need research and guidelines to help them to move towns and villages threatened by global warming, argue David López-Carr and Jessica Marter-Kenyon.

In this paper, we discuss the intent and purpose of Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Management Act/National Standard 8 and examine how it reinforces problematized conceptualizations of marine-space(s). We then dis