Tobias Kuemmerle

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Geography

Monitoring is a prerequisite for evidence‐based wildlife management and conservation planning, yet conventional monitoring approaches are often ineffective for species occurring at low densities. However, some species such as large mammals are often observed by lay people and this information can be leveraged through citizen science monitoring sche...

Tropical and subtropical dry woodlands are rich in biodiversity and carbon. Yet, many of these woodlands are under high deforestation pressure and remain weakly protected. Here, we assessed how deforestation dynamics relate to areas of woodland protection and to conservation priorities across the world's tropical dry woodlands. Specifically, we cha...

Aim Land‐use change and overexploitation are major threats to biodiversity, and climate change will exert additional pressure in the 21st century. Although there are strong interactions between these threats, our understanding of the synergistic and compensatory effects on threatened species' range geography remains limited. Our aim was to disentan...

Monitoring is a prerequisite for evidence-based wildlife management, yet conventional monitoring approaches are often ineffective for species occurring at low densities. However, some species such as large mammals are often observed by lay people and this information can be leveraged through citizen science monitoring schemes. Assessing the quantit...

Tropical dry forests are widespread, harbour vast amounts of carbon and unique biodiversity, and underpin the livelihoods of millions. A variety of natural and anthropogenic disturbances affect tropical dry forest canopy, yet our understanding of how these disturbances impact on forest structure and ecosystem functioning, and how forests develop af...

Following intense negotiation over several years, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework — adopted in December 2022 — includes an ambitious target for area-based conservation as part of the global effort to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Target 3 of the framework aims to increase the global cove...

Context Adjustments in habitat use by large carnivores can be a key factor facilitating their coexistence with people in shared landscapes. Landscape composition might be a key factor determining how large carnivores can adapt to occurring alongside humans, yet broad-scale analyses investigating adjustments of habitat use across large gradients of...

Agricultural intensification, an increase in per-area productivity, may spare forests otherwise lost to agricultural expansion. Yet which conditions enable such sparing or whether intensification amplifies deforestation through rebound effects remains hotly debated. Using a multilevel Bayesian regression framework, we analyse the effects of agricul...

Aim Several large‐mammal species in Europe have recovered and recolonized parts of their historical ranges. Knowing where suitable habitat exists, and thus where range expansions are possible, is important for proactively promoting coexistence between people and large mammals in shared landscapes. We aimed to assess the opportunities and limitation...

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...

The global trade of agricultural commodities has profound social-ecological impacts, from potentially increasing food availability and agricultural efficiency, to displacing local communities, and to incentivizing environmental destruction. Supply chain stickiness, understood as the stability in trading relationships between supply chain actors, mo...

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...

Aim Large carnivores are currently recolonizing parts of their historical ranges in Europe after centuries of persecution and habitat loss. Understanding the mechanisms driving these recolonizations is important for proactive conservation planning. Using the brown bear (Ursus arctos) and the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) as examples, we explore wher...

Abstract Livestock husbandry exerts major pressures on wildlife across the world. Large carnivores are particularly at risk because they are often killed by pastoralists as a preventive or precautionary response to livestock depredation. Minimizing the overlap between pastures and carnivore habitat can thus be a conservation strategy, but it remain...

Pulsed resources have prominent effects on community and ecosystem dynamics; however, there is little research on how resource pulses affect human–wildlife interactions. Tree masting is a common type of pulsed resource that represents a crucial food for many species and has important bottom‐up effects in food webs. In anthropogenic landscapes, year...

Tropical deforestation continues at alarming rates with profound impacts on ecosystems, climate, and livelihoods, prompting renewed commitments to halt its continuation. Although it is well established that agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation, rates and mechanisms remain disputed and often lack a clear evidence base. We synthesize the...

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...

Wars are frequent and can affect land use substantially, but the effects of wars can vary greatly depending on their characteristics, such as intensity or duration. Furthermore, the spatial scale of the effects can differ. The effects of wars may be localized and thus close to conflict locations if direct mechanisms matter most (e.g., abandonment b...

The long-term survival of the Persian leopard Panthera pardus tulliana requires concerted regional conservation efforts. Understanding occurrence patterns and population trends of the leopard and its prey are key prerequisite for planning conservation interventions and ensuring their effectiveness. However, systematic monitoring for these purposes...

Persian leopards Panthera pardus tulliana, once widespread across Western and Central Asia, currently only occupy a fraction of their historical range. Identifying areas for restoring, connecting, and expanding extant populations is therefore important to safeguard this subspecies. Here, we used a large dataset of Persian leopard occurrences from 1...

Tropical dry woodlands are rapidly being lost to agricultural expansion, but how deforestation dynamics play out in these woodlands remains poorly understood. We have developed an approach to detect and map high-level patterns of deforestation frontiers, that is, the expansion of woodland loss across continents in unprecedented spatio-temporal deta...

ContextBehavioral adjustments by large carnivores can be a key factor facilitating their coexistence with people in shared landscapes. Landscape composition might be a key factor determining how large carnivores can adapt to occurring alongside humans, yet broad-scale analyses investigating adjustments of habitat use across large gradients of human...

Large carnivores are making remarkable comebacks in Europe, but how this affects human-wildlife conflict remains unclear. Rebounding carnivore populations lead to increasing livestock depredation, which in turn leads to greater economic losses for farmers. However, returning carnivores could also influence the behavior of wild ungulates, which are...

International funding is increasingly important in supporting conservation in mega-biodiverse countries. However, it remains unclear which donors invest in which conservation objectives and where, making it difficult to identify gaps and key actors to influence. Here we identified 1947 foreign-aided conservation projects in South America's major de...

Droughts are often suspected to increase the risk of violent conflict through agricultural production shocks, and existing studies often explore these links through meteorological proxies. In Syria, an alleged agricultural collapse caused by drought is assumed to have contributed to increased migration and the conflict outbreak in 2011. Here we use...

Forest degradation in the tropics is a widespread, yet poorly understood phenomenon. This is particularly true for tropical and subtropical dry forests, where a variety of disturbances, both natural and anthropogenic, affect forest canopies. Addressing forest degradation thus requires a spatially-explicit understanding of the causes of disturbances...

Poaching is driving many species towards extinction, and lowering poaching pressure is, therefore, a conservation priority. This requires understanding where poaching pressure is high, and which factors determine these spatial patterns. But the cryptic and illegal nature of poaching makes this difficult. Ranger patrol data, typically recorded in pr...

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...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

Mountain ungulates around the world have been decimated to small, fragmented populations. Restoring these species often is limited by inadequate information on where suitable habitat is found, and which restoration measures would help to increase and link existing populations. We developed an approach to spatially target threat-specific restoration...

Land-use change is a global threat to biodiversity, but how land-use change affects species beyond the direct effect of habitat loss remains poorly understood. We developed an approach to isolate and map the direct and indirect effects of agricultural expansion on species of conservation concern, using the threatened giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tr...

Tropical dry forests harbor major carbon stocks but are disappearing rapidly across the globe as agriculture expands into them. Unfortunately, carbon emissions from deforestation in dry forests remain poorly understood as high spatial-temporal and vertical heterogeneity complicate biomass mapping. Here, we use a novel Gradient Boosted Regression fr...

Global biodiversity is under high and rising anthropogenic pressure. Yet, how the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional facets of biodiversity are affected by different threats over time is unclear. This is particularly true for the two main drivers of the current biodiversity crisis: habitat destruction and overexploitation. We provide the first...

Objectives We identified safe dispersal corridors and conflict-prone movement bottlenecks for Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) between protected areas in the Alborz Mountains, Iran, by mapping habitat, landscape permeability, and conflict risk. We then identified priority areas for conservation interventions according to the intensities...

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...

Land-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies of conservation, connecting conservation with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly the frontier concept – allows assessing the patterns, actors,...

International funding is increasingly important in supporting conservation in mega-biodiverse countries. However, it remains unclear which donors invest in which conservation objectives and where, making it difficult to identify gaps and key actors to influence. Here we identified 1947 foreign-aided conservation projects in South America's major de...

Unprecedented amounts of analysis‐ready Earth Observation (EO) data, combined with increasing computational power and new algorithms, offer novel opportunities for analysing ecosystem dynamics across large geographic extents, and to support conservation planning and action. Much research effort has gone into developing global EO‐based land‐cover an...

Armed conflicts have devastating humanitarian consequences, both direct and indirect. A crucial yet overlooked outcome is the disruption of local agricultural production and the consequent erosion of food security in war-ridden regions.

How does armed conflict influence tropical forest loss? For Colombia, both enhancing and reducing effect estimates have been reported. However, a lack of causal methodology has prevented establishing clear causal links between these two variables. In this work, we propose a class of causal models for spatio-temporal stochastic processes which allow...

Understanding the spatio‐temporal distribution of ungulates is important for effective wildlife management, particularly for economically and ecologically important species such as wild boar (Sus scrofa). Wild boars are generally considered to exhibit substantial behavioral flexibility, but it is unclear how their behavior varies across different c...

Both the number and the extent of protected areas have grown considerably in recent years, but evaluations of their effectiveness remain partial and are hard to compare across cases. To overcome this situation, first, we suggest reserving the term effectiveness solely for assessing protected area outcomes, to clearly distinguish this from managemen...

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...

Grasslands are important for global biodiversity, food security, and climate change analyses, which makes mapping and monitoring of vegetation changes in grasslands necessary to better understand, sustainably manage, and protect these ecosystems. However, grassland vegetation monitoring at spatial and temporal resolution relevant to land management...

Climate change disproportionately threatens alpine species, by reducing available habitat and by isolating their populations. These pressures are particularly relevant for rear-edge populations, which typically occupy more marginal habitat compared to populations at the core of species' ranges. We studied Caucasian grouse Lyrurus mlokosiewiczi in t...

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...

Humans have transformed most landscapes across the globe, forcing other species to adapt in order to persist in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes. Wide-ranging solitary species, such as wild felids, struggle particularly in such landscapes. Conservation planning and management for their long-term persistence critically depends on understanding...

Primary forests, defined here as forests where the signs of human impacts, if any, are strongly blurred due to decades without forest management, are scarce in Europe and continue to disappear. Despite these losses, we know little about where these forests occur. Here, we present a comprehensive geodatabase and map of Europe’s known primary forests...

High conservation value forests (HCVF) are critically important for biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning, but face manifold threats. Where systematic HCVF inventories are missing, such as in parts of Eastern Europe, these forests remain largely unacknowledged and therefore often unprotected. Here, we propose a novel, transferable approac...

Forest loss in the tropics affects large areas, but whereas full forest conversions are routinely assessed, forest degradation patters remain often unclear. This is particularly so for the world’s tropical dry forests, where remote sensing of forest disturbances is challenging due to high canopy complexity, strong phenology and climate variability,...

As wild areas disappear and agricultural lands expand, understanding how people and wildlife can coexist becomes increasingly important. Human–wildlife conflicts (HWCs) are obstacles to coexistence and negatively affect both wildlife populations and the livelihood of people. To facilitate coexistence, a number of frameworks have been developed to b...

Context Better balancing agricultural production and biodiversity conservation is a central goal for many landscapes. Yet, empirical work on how to best achieve such a balance has focused mainly on the local scale, thereby disregarding that landscape context might mediate biodiversity-agriculture trade-offs. Objectives Focusing on vertebrates in th...

Large carnivores are currently disappearing from many world regions due to habitat loss, prey depletion, and persecution. Ensuring large carnivore persistence requires safeguarding and sometimes facilitating the expansion of their populations. Understanding which conservation strategies, such as reducing persecution or restoring prey, are most effe...

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...

Climate change disproportionately threatens alpine species, by reducing available habitat and by isolating their populations. These pressures are particularly relevant for rear-edge populations, which typically occupy more marginal habitat compared to populations at the core of species' ranges. We studied Caucasian grouse Lyrurus mlokosiewiczi in t...

Global biodiversity is under high and rising anthropogenic pressure. Yet, how the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional facets of biodiversity are affected by different threats over time is unclear. This is particularly true for the two main drivers of the current biodiversity crisis: habitat destruction and overexploitation. We provide the first...

Maintaining or restoring connectivity among wildlife populations is a primary strategy to overcome the negative impacts of habitat fragmentation. Yet, current connectivity planning efforts typically assess landscape resistance, the ability of organisms to cross various biophysical elements in a landscape, while overlooking the various ways in which...

Land-use change is a root cause of the extinction crisis, but links between habitat change and biodiversity loss are not fully understood. While there is evidence that habitat loss is an important extinction driver, the relevance of habitat fragmentation remains debated. Moreover, while time delays of biodiversity responses to habitat transformatio...