Germán Baldi

National Scientific and Technical Research Council | conicet · IMASL Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis

In a recent speech to the UN General Assembly, Argentine President Javier Milei rejected the Pact for the Future and the 2030 Agenda, a comprehensive global framework for sustainable development encompassing ‘people, planet, and prosperity.’ This position undermines Argentina’s capacity to tackle urgent socio-environmental challenges like poverty,...

Dry subtropical (DST) regions that share similar climatic and topographic conditions exhibit today significant disparities in population density, agricultural intensity, wealth and cultural values. In addition, they are also facing increasing pressures on their natural resources. These attributes collectively shape individuals' varying dependence o...

Based on the foundation dates of cities, we developed a spatial model of European colonization timing for the Americas, a major social-ecological event in its environmental history. Colonization occurred gradually during the past 500 years, but with two main “waves”, an early one prior to 1600, and a late one during the nineteenth century, followin...

Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its miti-gation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of...

Nature Portfolio: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0eo4sHN3Dc/ From an era marked by significant biodiversity loss, emerges the ‘30 x 30’ movement, aiming to conserve a minimum of 30% of terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. As scientists strive for this goal, they must take into account key aspects of nature conservation and environmental sustainability. Th...

Expanding protected areas (PAs) is a worldwide endeavour aimed at addressing the biodiversity crisis and harnessing the benefits that natural ecosystems provide to humanity. However, conservation agendas often overlook the spatial geometry of PAs—shape and size—and its implications for critical issues such as agricultural encroachment, poaching, bi...

Until recently, the development of a global geography of floods was challenged by the fragmentation and heterogeneity of in situ data and the high costs of processing large amounts of remote sensing data. Such geography would facilitate the exploration of large‐scale drivers of flood extent and timing including wide latitudinal, climate, and topogr...

Until recently, the development of a global geography of floods was challenged by the fragmentation and heterogeneity of in situ data and the high costs of processing large amounts of remote sensing data. Such geography would facilitate the exploration of large-scale drivers of flood extent and timing including wide latitudinal, climate, and topogr...

Los bosques nativos son los ecosistemas naturales que más atención reciben de la sociedad en relación con su conservación y manejo. El alcance de la definición de bosque nativo ha cambiado con el tiempo, lo cual afecta la implementación de diversos instrumentos que usan las instituciones (e.g., cuando se identifican las coberturas de bosques alcanz...

Subtropical drylands, such as the South American Dry Chaco, harbor azonal grasslands in ancient river beds (hereafter, paleochannels). These grasslands host high biodiversity and provide numerous ecosystem services. However, cultivated systems often replace paleochannels grasslands due to their biophysical characteristics and low investment require...

The Río de la Plata Grasslands (RPG) region is the largest area of the temperate humid and sub-humid grasslands biome in South America and one of the largest in the world. The region is located on fertile soils, generally very suitable for agricultural development, so it is undergoing an intense land cover change process. Our knowledge of these cha...

Grasslands have been subject to contraction and fragmentation processes worldwide, mainly due to their transformation into commercial tree plantations and agricultural lands. Identifying the remaining grasslands areas and the drivers of its fragmentation constitute an important step towards their appreciation, conservation and sustainability monito...

Logging, grazing, wood extraction, and anthropogenic fires are pervasive throughout the subtropical dry vegetation of South America leading to changes in woodlands structure and ultimately its degradation. The Chaco region encompasses the second-largest forest in South America and has a long history of intensive use. We sought to characterize struc...

Aim: Invasive species have the potential to alter hydrological processes by changing the local water balance. However, general patterns of how rainfall is partitioned into interception, throughfall and stemflow for invasive species worldwide have been seldom explored. We (a) describe the percentage of interception, throughfall and stemflow for inva...

Pine tree invasions threaten many natural ecosystems of the Southern Hemisphere, modifying their structure and functioning through shifts in fire regimes, water balance, and biodiversity. The magnitude of such impacts depends on how much of the landscape has been invaded, thus a better understanding of the dispersal ability of pines and predictions...

States are reacting to the global crises of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services mainly through the expansion of their networks of protected areas. This reaction would have been boosted by the commitments made between the parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and facilitated by the opportunities offered by isolated terr...

Over the last decades, the rapid replacement of native forests by crops and pastures in the Argentinean semiarid Chaco plains has triggered unprecedented groundwater level raises resulting from deep drainage increases, leading to the first massive waterlogging event on records (~25.000 Ha flooded in 2015 near Bandera, one of the most cultivated clu...

Soil is the most important terrestrial carbon (C) reservoir but is greatly impacted by land use change (LUC). Previous analyses of LUC impacts on soil C have focused on biophysical variables, leaving aside the influence of socioeconomics. The aim of our study was to determine global soil organic carbon (SOC) change patterns after LUC and to assess...

Supplementary Material

Protected areas are one of the most effective tools for nature conservation. Consequently, almost all countries have agreed to set increasingly demanding goals for the expansion of their protected area systems. However, there is a large disparity among countries, and research on the cultural drivers of differences remains quite unexplored. Here, we...

Sustainability science recognizes the importance of the integrated assessment of the ecological and social systems in land-use planning. However, most studies so far have been conceptual rather than empirical. We developed a framework to characterize the social-ecological systems heterogeneity according to its functioning through the identification...

Protected areas are one of the most effective tools for nature conservation. Consequently, almost all countries have agreed to set increasingly demanding goals for the expansion of their protected area systems. However, there is a large disparity among countries, and research on the cultural drivers of differences remains quite unexplored. Here, we...

The Dry Chaco is mostly known as a forested ecosystem. However it includes natural grasslands, savannas, scrublands, and wetlands. With one of the highest global deforestation rates in the last two decades and only 12% of the area protected, the concern about land-use change in this ecoregion has raised exponentially; but conservation initiatives d...

Background. South America faces strong environmental pressures as a result of agriculture and infrastructure expansion and also of demographic growth, demanding immediate action to preserve natural assets by establishing protected areas. Currently, 7.1% of the (sub)continent is under strict conservation categories (I to IV, IUCN), but the spatial d...

Background South America faces strong environmental transformations due to agriculture and infrastructure expansion and due to demographic growth, demanding immediate action to preserve natural assets by means of the deployment of protected areas. Currently, 7.1% of the (sub)continent is under strict conservation categories (I to IV, IUCN), but the...

El vasto territorio del Chaco Seco y el Espinal se consolida como uno de los centros globales de producción de granos y carne. Tanto por distintas normas legales y limitaciones productivas, como por causas culturales, el bosque nativo se preserva en grandes porciones y numerosos pequeños fragmentos inmersos en la matriz agrícola. Estos remanentes s...

The net amount of rainfall entering into the soil and its spatial distribution at the patch scale are key drivers of ecosystem processes in drylands. The spatial distribution of water is mainly controlled by vegetation canopy which determines the partitioning of rainfall into interception, throughfall and stemflow. In this paper, we synthesized and...

V Congreso Internacional de Servicios Ecosistémicos de los Neotrópicos

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Background Protected areas, regarded today as a cornerstone of nature conservation, result from an array of multiple motivations and opportunities. We explored at global and regional levels the current distribution of protected areas along biophysical, human, and biological gradients, and assessed to what extent protection has pursued (i) a balance...

Background Protected areas, regarded today as a cornerstone of nature conservation, result from an array of multiple motivations and opportunities. We explored at global and regional levels the current distribution of protected areas along biophysical, human, and biological gradients, and assessed to what extent protection has pursued (i) a balance...

Supporting Information

The subtropical dry forests are experiencing rapid clearing in the southamerican Great Chaco region, mainly for soybean production in Argentina. This is causing biodiversity loss and soil salinization. This forests are unique for the floristic richness and the dense forest cover in a region characterized by semiarid climatic conditions. The authors...

The aim of this work was to determine Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato species and genotypes in intermediate and definitive hosts and in human isolates from endemic regions of Argentina and Brazil including those where no molecular data is available by a combination of classical and alternative molecular tools. A total of 227 samples were isolate...

Few field studies examine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from African agricultural systems, resulting in high uncertainty for national inventories. This lack of data is particularly noticeable in smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa, where low inputs are often correlated with low yields, often resulting in food insecurity as well. We provide the...

The dry subtropics are subject to a rapid expansion of crops and pastures over vast areas of natural woodlands and savannas. In this paper, we explored the effect of this transformation on vegetation productivity (magnitude, and seasonal and long-term variability) along aridity gradients which span from semiarid to subhumid conditions, considering...

The absolute effect of cultivating the dry subtropics at the global level. Each panel represents the difference between cultivated and natural additive models for the 0.5 and 0.9 or 0.1 quantiles (τ50 and τ90 or τ10) in relation to PPT:PET. Numbers within panels indicate average values about the differences between land use/cover systems according...

In Baldi_et al_Sup Inf (data).xlsx, all EVI values and EVI metrics data are available. (XLSX)

Regional differences in the precipitation and the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). We calculated precipitation and PAR (MJ*m-2) from the Climatic Research Unit–UEA “Ten Minute Climatology” data base [23], with a spatial resolution of 10 min (1961–1990 period). For PAR, average values about the sunshine (fraction of maximum daylength) were...

Extreme functional responses to water availability of natural vs. cultivated systems at the regional level. Each panel represents the behavior of an EVI-based functional metric and region in relation to the PPT:PET. Each dot represents a sampling point and each line an additive 0.9 or 0.1 quantiles (τ90 or τ10) model. Note that not all regions cove...

Sampling details (transects and points) across the dry subtropics receiving summer rains. (DOC)

Median functional responses to water availability of natural vs. cultivated systems at the regional level. Each panel represents the behavior of an EVI-based functional metric and region in relation to the PPT:PET. Each dot represents a sampling point and each line an additive 0.5 quantile (τ50) model. Note that not all regions cover the entire wat...

Extreme effects of cultivating the dry subtropics at global and regional levels. Average and standard deviation values for the seven EVI-based functional metrics showing 0.9quantile (τ90) and 0.9quantile (τ10) additive median models of natural and cultivated systems (fitted values in S3 Fig). Acronym: CV, coefficient of variation. (DOC)

Kendall’s τ non-parametric correlation coefficients among functional metrics. (DOC)

Extreme functional responses to water availability of natural vs. cultivated systems at the global level. Each panel represents the behavior of an EVI-based functional metric in relation to the PPT:PET. The thin lines represent the individual additive models for the 0.9 or 0.1 quantiles (τ90 or τ10) after a resampling approach (500 points). The thi...

The replacement of natural vegetation by pastures and extensive crops is generally driven by economic incentives and supported by technology improvements and multiple subsidies. However, towards areas of increasing aridity the productive performance of these replacements may decline from all perspectives – ecological to agro-nomic to economic – due...

Background. The establishment of protected areas, regarded today as a cornerstone of nature conservation, resulted from a multiple array of motivations and opportunities. We explore at global and regional levels, the current distribution of protected areas along biophysical, human, and biological gradients, and assess to what extent protection purs...

Background. The establishment of protected areas, regarded today as a cornerstone of nature conservation, resulted from a multiple array of motivations and opportunities. We explore at global and regional levels, the current distribution of protected areas along biophysical, human, and biological gradients, and assess to what extent protection purs...

This chapter presents a method for targeting landscapes with the objective of assessing mitigation options for smallholder agriculture. It presents alternatives in terms of the degree of detail and complexity of the analysis, to match the requirement of research and development initiatives. We address heterogeneity in land-use decisions that is lin...

In this paper we explored how aridity influences the regional deforestation and land-use patterns (i.e. crops/pastures) in South American Dry Chaco. To do this, we contrasted land use during last decade (2001–2012) with a spatially explicit aridity index, which we complemented with a crop water balance model. Land-use classifications were performed...

Chapter 2: Targeting landscapes to identify mitigation options in smallholder agriculture. In: MEASUREMENT METHODS: Guidelines for field measurements of agricultural greenhouse gas sources and sinks, pp. 1-26. CGIAR & CCAFS. http://samples.ccafs.cgiar.org/measurement-methods-overview/

Objective: To systematically review publications on Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato species/genotypes reported in domestic intermediate and definitive hosts in South America and in human cases worldwide, taking into account those articles where DNA sequencing was performed; and to analyse the density of each type of livestock that can act as in...

Few field studies examine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from African agricultural systems resulting in high uncertainty for national inventories. We provide here the most comprehensive study in Africa to date, examining annual CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from 59 plots, across different vegetation types, field types and land classes in western Kenya...

Charcoal production has been widespread in the past and is still common where poor societies and dry forests coexist. For the Dry Chaco in South America, one of the largest remaining dry forests of the world, we describe the geographical distribution, type of production systems, environmental and social context and output of charcoal based on remot...

In the Río de la Plata grasslands (RPG) biogeographical region of South America, agricultural activities have undergone important changes during the last 15-18 years because of technological improvements and new national and international market conditions. We characterized changes in the landscape structure between 1985-1989 and 2002-2004 for eigh...

1 RESUMEN: Uno de los pilares del proceso de ordenamiento territorial rural (OTR) es determinar la potencialidad de un espacio geográfi co para proveer determinados bienes y servicios (ecosistémicos, produc vos, sociales). Hasta hace pocos años, dicho proceso requería necesariamente la generación propia de planos de información espacialmente explíc...

Land use change, particularly in forested ecosystems, has a direct impact on the global carbon cycle. Consequently, the regional assessment of biomass and the understanding of its current spatial controls are research priorities for regional ecology and land use. Field data and satellite imagery were combined here to map woodlands and estimate thei...

Export Date: 2 July 2013, Source: Scopus

El Chaco Seco experimenta altas tasas de deforestación y transformación productiva. Estimamos la magnitud de la apropiación humana de la productividad primaria neta (PPN) aérea de esta región por vías directas (producción ganadera, forestal y agrícola) e indirectas (fuego), su distribución regional, su relación con variables climáticas y socioeconó...

Dry subtropical regions (DST), originally hosting woodlands and savannas, are subject to contrasting human pressures and land uses and different degrees of water limitation. We quantified how this variable context influences landscape pattern and vegetation functioning, by exploring the associations between three groups of variables describing (i)...

We studied the associations between small mammal assemblages and patterns of land use and landscape structure, and their seasonal variations in temperate agroecosystems. We collected barn owl, Tyto alba , pellets from nest sites located in the Pampean region included in Buenos Aires province (36 sites in winter and 29 in summer). We used Google Ear...

Rapidly increasing demand for food, fiber, and fuel together with new technologies and the mobility of global capital are driving revolutionary changes in land use throughout the world. Efforts to increase land productivity include conversion of millions of hectares of rangelands to crop production, including many marginal lands with low resistance...

Climate variability affects both animal and plant populations. Understanding how this variability is modulated by topography, vegetation and population densities and how this impact on ungulate demography is an important step in order to forecast consequences of alternative management scenarios or the effects of climate change.Structural equation m...

Dry subtropical regions, originally hosting xerophytic vegetation, are currently characterized by diverse land cover/use patterns. Using existing biophysical and socio-economic databases, we explored how human contexts influenced land cover, vegetation composition and agricultural production in five distant regions. On average, cultivated areas rep...