Marcellus Caldas

• D.Sc., Ph.D.
• Professor & AAAS Fellow at Kansas State University

A common problem for interdisciplinary sustainability research is that scientists trained in different disciplines are often not rowing their boat effectively in the same direction. Sustainability tools can aid the implementation of this team-melding process. Here, our purpose is to illustrate our Multi-step Integrated graphical and structured disc...

Brazil, as a global player in soybean production, contributes about 35% to the world’s supply and over half of its agricultural exports. Therefore, reliable information about its development becomes imperative to those who follow the market. Thus, this study estimates three phenological stages of soybean crops (sowing, beginning seed, and harvestin...

Scientific experts from different disciplines often struggle to mesh their specialized perspectives into the shared mindset that is needed to address difficult and persistent environmental, ecological, and societal problems. Many traditional graduate programs provide excellent research and technical skill training. However, these programs often do...

Water surplus and deficits are crucial concerns in water management with climate change and increasing demand. We investigated spatial and temporal variations in the net water flux (precipitation minus evapotranspiration) as an indicator of water availability over the main water basins of the Brazilian Cerrado biome from 2000 to 2019 (20 years). Ne...

Microwave remote sensing such as NASA’s Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite has great potential for global- and continental-scale soil moisture mapping. However, its coarse spatial resolution (36 km) often hinders field-scale applications in agriculture. The Optical TRApezoid Model (OPTRAM) is an emerging method that fills this gap by har...

Accurate land use and land cover (LULC) mapping is essential for scientific and decision-making purposes. The objective of this paper was to map LULC classes in the northern region of Mozambique between 2011 and 2020 based on Landsat time series processed by the Random Forest classifier in the Google Earth Engine platform. The feature selection met...

Areas set aside for conservation within private lands may be key to enhancing biodiversity-friendly landscapes. This conservation strategy should be especially effective in highly threatened regions that are poorly protected by public lands, such as the Brazilian Cerrado. Brazil’s Native Vegetation Protection Law has included set-aside areas within...

Areas set aside for conservation within private lands may be key to enhancing biodiversity-friendly landscapes. This conservation strategy should be especially effective in highly threatened regions that are poorly protected by public lands, such as the Brazilian Cerrado. Brazil’s Native Vegetation Protection Law has included set-aside areas within...

Knowing reference (i.e., baseline) riverine nutrient concentrations is essential to understand fundamental processes of biogeochemical transport from continents to the ocean, describing ecological conditions, and informing managers of best attainable conditions for nutrient abatement and controlling anthropogenic eutrophication. We used data from 4...

Consumers are increasingly demanding information regarding the characteristics of products, their place of origin and methods of production. A Geographical Indication (GI) can be understood as a way to meet these demands, as it protects the origin of the product, as well as its characteristics. In addition to contributing to territorial development...

Science has played a mixed role in guiding conservation and sustainability-oriented decision-making by individuals, policymakers, institutions, and governments. Not all science-based conservation and sustainability initiatives that address issues facing humanity and ecosystems and global problems have gained public support. Conservation decisions a...

Agricultural landscapes are the leading edge in the advancement of sustainability and climate change adaptation. The purpose of this study is to endogenize culture as shaped by natural-cultural feedback into individuals’ decision-making processes on sustainability policy support. We present an agent-based model in which an adaptive cultural decisio...

Biofuel expansion may entail elaborate contractual relationships between processors and farmers. Past studies have been limited to explaining choices between single contracts or standard land fixed rental versus crop share contracts. Little is known about how changes in contract attributes affect the probability of farmers' switching between contra...

Estimating vulnerability is critical to understand human-induced influenceimpacts on the environmental system. The purpose of the current study was to integrate machine learning algorithm and Twitter data to estimate environmental vulnerability in the Brazilian Cerrado for the years 2011 and 2016. We first selected six exposure indicators and five...

Brazilian public institutions have difficulties in building relationships of trust that truly promote sustainable development. This study proves that the Extractive Reserves (RESEX) socio-environmental crisis occurs due to the interdependent relationship that exists between environmental, economic, social groups and institutional organizations. The...

Information obtained from studies of spatial variability and the Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS) may contribute to understanding better the relationship between mineral nutrient balance and factors that limit the crop yield. This study shows that nutritionally balanced plants may be associated with low productivity in Conilon...

Agricultural expansion as a main human activity has affected pollinator's habitat, causing spatial distribution changes. Meanwhile, pollinators still provide pollination service to improve crop production. However, their spatial response is unclear because of environmental changes. This study sought to estimate spatial distribution of crop producti...

Based on the Resource-Based View (VBR) theory, this work analyzed how the internal resources of the rural sugarcane properties in the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás influence their agricultural performance. It was an applied exploratory study, involving a field research with 148 rural producers. The quantitative analysis revealed difference...

The impetus behind this study is to understand the sedimentological dynamics of very young fluvial systems in the Amazon River catchment and relate these to land use change and modern analogue studies of tidal rhythmites in the geologic record. Initial quartz optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating feasibility studies have concentrated on sp...

Disasters are an unpredictable way to change land use and land cover. Improving the accuracy of mapping a disaster area at different time is an essential step to analyze the relationship between human activity and environment. The goals of this study were to test the performance of different processing procedures and examine the effect of adding no...

The launching of biofuel vehicles in 2003 led to ethanol demand increase and a new phase of expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Brazil. Although the increase in area of production and the quantity of sugarcane produced have been very important to Brazilian agribusiness, the recent agricultural productivity rate has slowed. In this context, this a...

Sustainability has been at the forefront of the environmental research agenda of the integrated anthroposphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere since the last century and will continue to be critically important for future environmental science. However, linking humans and the environment through effective policy remains a major challenge for sustainabi...

This study filled a gap in literature by analyzing how institutional and market changes that have occurred since the 1990s in Brazil influenced the geographical distribution of milk production in Paraná State, Brazil. In addition, this study discussed the formation of new production frontiers and their impacts on the dairy actor's production chain....

Climate change in many agricultural contexts will increase tensions between farming and non-farming populations over adaptations in land use and water conservation strategies. How adequately these future tensions may be mitigated will be partially determined by each groups' beliefs about climate change. A voluminous literature shows that climate ch...

From 2005 to 2012 sugarcane planted area increased by 54% in Brazil, reaching 9 million ha. This expansion was stronger in the Brazilian Cerrado, especially in the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul which are the new frontier of sugarcane production. The rapid expansion of sugarcane production in Brazil has the potential to reorganize the agric...

The rise in global demand for ethanol has caused an expansion of ethanol mills into new areas to increase supply. Ethanol mills are supply-oriented firms; thus, they seek locations near agricultural feedstocks to ensure access and to reduce transaction costs. In Brazil, the rise of ethanol production has been more significant in the states of Goiás...

The sugarcane industry in Brazil, one of the world's leading producers of ethanol and sugar, is undergoing significant changes driven by geographic expansion and technological innovations. These changes are forcing sugarcane producers and processors, to re‐evaluate their vertical coordination and growth strategies. This paper presents an empirical...

To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers. Impacts varied predictably with prior development – prior roads and prior deforestation – and, further, in a pattern that suggests a potential synergy...

An increase in biofuel demand aligned with public policies has fueled the expansion of sugarcane into Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul in the Cerrado. Geographic, temporal and physical asset specificities delimit the area from which mills can procure sugarcane, making sugarcane producers and mills dependent on each other. Thus contracting is a common p...

Although bioenergy is a renewable energy source, it is not without impact on the environment. Both the cultivation of crops specifically for use as biofuels and the use of agricultural byproducts to generate energy changes the landscape, affects ecosystems, and impacts the climate. Bioenergy and Land Use Change focuses on regional and global assess...

Global demand for ethanol has increased in the last decade. In Brazil, the rise of ethanol production has been more significant in the Brazilian Cerrado, specifically in the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. Although the Cerrado is not a traditional sugarcane producing region, it has become the new frontier for sugarcane ethanol. Under these...

Brazil is the fourth largest milk producer in the world, and Paraná state is the third largest producer in the country. Milk production plays an important socioeconomic role in Paraná state, and since the 1990s, institutional and market changes have influenced Paraná’s milk production. Given this context, this study searches to analyze the spatial...

Identifying means of empirically modeling the human component of a coupled, human-water system becomes critically important to further advances in socio-hydrology. We develop a social-psychological model of environmental decision-making that addresses four key challenges of incorporating social science into integrated models. We use the model to ex...

The expansion of sugarcane production in the Brazilian Cerrado has resulted in indirect land-use change (ILUC), occurring when displaced land-uses in one location are reallocated to another. Studies, however, usually identify ILUC at the regional or national level far from the original area of a displaced land-use. This study examines the occurrenc...

Brazil is the fourth largest milk producer in the world, and Paraná state is the third largest producer in the country. Milk production plays an important socioeconomic role in Paraná state, and since the 1990s, institutional and market changes have influenced Paraná's milk production. Given this context, this study searches to analyze the spatial...

The United States is becoming more ecologically and economically vulnerable to extreme environmental degradation as a result of the combined risks related to anthropogenic climate change and agriculture. This threat to society and the environment is especially acute in semi-arid regions like the Great Plains of Kansas where agriculture and cattle g...

Este trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar a alteração da composição agrícola na região Centro-Oeste do Brasil, especificamente nos estados de Mato Grosso do Sul e Goiás, provocada pela significativa expansão do cultivo da cana-de-açúcar. O Modelo Shift-Share foi utilizado para calcular os efeitos escala e substituição das principais atividades em an...

This case study describes Brazilian ethanol industry and strategic issues faced by sugarcane farmers and processors as a result of recent industry expansion into the states of Goias and Mato Grosso do Sul. It provides detailed description of the ethanol supply chain in Brazil from field to market and discusses market drivers influencing the industr...

Among the important alternatives for land conservation is the US Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015. This paper explores how landowners decide on alternative land-use choices made available by the expiration of CRP contracts in Kansas. The study uses survey data and multinomial Logit models to predict la...

The semi-arid Central Great Plains of the US is a region characterized by extreme natural climate variability and water stress, with stream networks commonly becoming partially or entirely dewatered during dry seasons and drought periods. The proliferation of small dams in the region has introduced substantial fragmentation into the regional stream...

Amazonian deforestation has declined recently, but Brazil’s infrastructure plans continue to target the region. In the interest of sustainable development, this article engages the spatial discourses in conservation planning and landscape ecology. It does so by addressing fishbone fragmentation, commonly observed in development frontiers in Brazil....

Abstract Amazonian deforestation has declined recently, but Brazil’s infrastructure plans continue to target the region. In the interest of sustainable development, this article engages the spatial discourses in conservation planning and landscape ecology. It does so by addressing fishbone fragmentation, commonly observed in development frontiers i...

The damming of small headwater streams is a common feature of the Central Great Plains. These dams create water storage but also fragment the connectivity of river networks. The proliferation of these small dams has severely fragmented many of the tributaries to Smoky-Hill River by acting as barriers to sediment transport, continuous stream flow, a...

Within the past decade, the sugarcane ethanol industry in Brazil has increased its production capacity to meet rising domestic demand for ethanol. However, to achieve this growth the industry has had to expand into new frontiers in the Brazilian Cerrado, specifically in the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul, which is now the second largest pro...

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...

Resumo - Este trabalho analisou os determinantes do desmatamento em pequenas propriedades na Amazônia, em uma área de colonização localizada ao longo da rodovia Transamazônica, no município de Uruará - PA. Foram aplicados 138 questionários na área de estudo, durante os meses de julho e agosto de 2002. Estimou-se um modelo Tobit com seletividade amo...

A demanda por alternativas energéticas tem aumentando a produção mundial de biocombustíveis e, consequentemente, o cultivo das culturas agrícolas. No Brasil, o lançamento dos veículos bicombustíveis propiciou a retomada da importância da produção de etanol e, consequentemente, numa nova fase de expansão do cultivo de cana-de-açúcar. Diversas questõ...

The demand for energy alternatives to oil are increasing global biofuel production and, consequently, the biofuel crops cultivation. In Brazil, the emergence of flex-fuel vehicles resumed the importance of ethanol production, resulting in a new phase of Brazilian sugar cane crop expansion. Several issues related to the sustainability of biofuel pro...

Joplin, a city in the southwest corner of Missouri, United States, suffered an EF-5 tornado in the late afternoon of 22 May 2011. This event, which claimed the lives of 162 people, represents the deadliest single tornado to strike the US since modern record-keeping began in 1950. This study examines the factors associated with responses to tornado...

Energy conservation has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the world in the XXI century, and not different from many countries, the US has created plans and policies to stimulate renewable energy alternative. Among the important alternatives for energy conservation is the use of biomass energy. Despite these stimuli production predictions...

Direct action land reform (DALR) and settlement formation are new drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. However, until now no research has paid attention to fragmentation patterns and the social processes that lead to them. This article analyzes two types of settlements, spontaneous and social movement organization-led settlements. The...

Land-use and land-cover change has been a topic that has called the attention of the scientific community for decades. Because of the importance of tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems, investigations into the causes and processes (e.g., underlying and proximate causation) that drive land use and land-cover change have typically concentrated...

Many economic processes are intertwined with landscape change. A large number of individual economic decisions shape the landscape, and in turn the changes in the landscape shape economic decisions. This article describes key research questions about the economics of landscape change and reviews the state of research knowledge. The rich and varied...

During the last few decades, the media, government leaders, scholars and national security analysts have all called attention to the potential threat presented by terrorism. In general, analyses have focused on the use of biological agents to kill or injure people. Consequently, the intentional contamination of crops by biological agents has receiv...

Land change in the Amazon is driven by numerous factors including fiscal incentives, infrastructure, transportation costs, migration, and household decision making. Largely missing from the story to date, however, is the role of contentious social processes, including contention over land resources. By employing a case study of land conflict over a...

This article deploys the "Theater of Cruelty," articulated by the French surrealist Antonin Artaud, as a conceptual heuristic to explicate the empirical world of contemporary Amazonia, in particular the " South of Para," a site of land war and forest destruction, which the Theater of Cruelty posits as a single dramatic event. We pursue this explica...

Expansion of global demand for soy products and biofuel poses threats to food security and the environment. One environmental impact that has raised serious concerns is loss of Amazonian forest through indirect land use change (ILUC), whereby mechanized agriculture encroaches on existing pastures, displacing them to the frontier. This phenomenon ha...

State-led agrarian reform (SLAR) settlements established in the Amazon in the 1970s led to environmental degradation and mixed socioeconomic outcomes. More recently, direct-action land reform (DALR) settlements have proliferated, which are leading to new forest clearing in the name of agrarian reform. The emergence of DALR begs questions about soci...

This article analyses migration histories of residents in rural settlements of the Brazilian Amazon that resulted from direct action land reform (DALR), which involves organised land occupations. Our analysis evaluates two hypotheses. The 'urban migration' expectation asserts that urban experience is important for DALR participation, which links ru...

Summary The present paper considers a sometimes contentious process of land reform presently occurring in Brazil. This process, referred to in the paper as Direct Action Land Reform (DALR), involves organizations such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) and more spontaneous actions of indivi...

The present paper describes the contentious process of settlement formation of a particular type of land reform settlement, which we call "spontaneous" direct action land reform. In addition, the paper place the settlement formation process within a land cover and land use framework by describing the underlying processes that lead to spontaneous se...

Wendy Wolford uses her fifteen years of experience with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra, or MST (the Rural Landless Worker's Movement) to write This Land is Ours Now. The book is centered on extensive ethnographic research in two states in Brazil, Santa Catarina and Pernambuco. Wolford seeks to understand social mobilization within a move...

The present paper describes the contentious process of settlement formation of a particular type of land reform settlement, which we call "spontaneous" direct action land reform. In addition, the paper place the settlement formation process within a land cover and land use framework by describing the underlying processes that lead to spontaneous se...

The present paper describes the contentious process of settlement formation of a par-ticular type of land reform settlement, which we call “spontaneous” direct action land reform. In addition, the paper place the settlement formation process within a land cover and land use framework by describing the underlying processes that lead to spontaneous s...

This paper seeks to understand how the Brazilian Amazon, which many thought unsuitable for agricultural development, has yielded to a dynamic cattle economy in only a few decades. It does so by embedding the Thunian model of location rents within the regime of capital accumulation that has driven the Brazilian economy since the mid-20th century. Th...

This article addresses climate-tipping points in the Amazon Basin resulting from deforestation. It applies a regional climate model to assess whether the system of protected areas in Brazil is able to avoid such tipping points, with massive conversion to semiarid vegetation, particularly along the south and southeastern margins of the basin. The re...

This chapter discusses the relationship between small farmers' land use and deforestation, with particular attention paid to the past 30 years of Amazonian colonization in Brazil and Ecuador. Our analysis calls attention to common features uniting different social groups as small farmers (e.g., social identity, access to land and resources, technol...

Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road b...

We used a configurational comparative approach, the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), to study multiple causal interactions characterizing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Our data set is based on seven local case studies at three time periods. Results reveal a limited number of pathways describing the articulation of causes of deforest...

It is obvious that roads facilitate access to natural resources. It is less clear, however, why the “spatial structure” of road networks varies among locations in tropical forest frontiers, which bears implications for the “spatial geometry” of forest fragmentation and the sustainability of resource-based development. We present a comparati...

O sul do Pará, localizado no coração da Amazônia brasileira, tornou- se famoso devido à violência da luta pela terra. Apesar da longa história acerca de conflitos agrários, no Brasil, e seus diversos impactos nas variadas regiões do país, a violência é mais grave e persistente nessa área. O objetivo do presente artigo é examinar as razões disso. Es...

This article describes a quantitative assessment of the output from the Behavioral Landscape Model (BLM), which has been developed to simulate the spatial pattern of deforestation (i.e. forest fragmentation) in the Amazon basin in a manner consistent with human behavior. The assessment consists of eighteen runs for a section of the Transamazon High...

The South of Pará, located in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, has become notorious for violent land struggle. Although land conflict has a long history in Brazil, and today impacts many parts of the country, violence is most severe and persistent here. The purpose of this article is to examine why. Specifically, we consider how a particular Amaz...

Unofficial roads form dense networks in landscapes, generating a litany of negative ecological outcomes, but in frontier areas they are also instrumental in local livelihoods and community development. This trade-off poses dilemmas for the governance of unofficial roads. Unofficial road building in frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon illustrates...

Roads have manifold social and environmental impacts, including regional development, social conflicts and habitat fragmentation. ‘Road ecology’ has emerged as an approach to evaluate the various ecological and hydrological impacts of roads. This article aims to complement road ecology by examining the socio-spatial processes of road building itsel...

This article addresses deforestation processes in the Amazon basin, using regression analysis to assess the impact of household structure and economic circumstances on land use decisions made by colonist farmers in the forest frontiers of Brazil. Unlike many previous regression-based studies, the methodology implemented analyzes behavior at the lev...