GLP welcomes entries to the Data Visualization Challenge in Land Systems Science, to be held in conjunction with the GLP-OSM 2014. The purpose of the challenge is to encourage and highlight the creation of data visualization products within the Global Land Project's land system science community. Entries encompassing the OSM theme from any conference participant are welcome.

Quantification of global forest change has been lacking despite the recognized importance of forest ecosystem services. In this study, Earth observation satellite data were used to map global forest loss (2.3 million square kilometers) and gain (0.8 million square kilometers) from 2000 to 2012 at a spatial resolution of 30 meters. The tropics were the only climate domain to exhibit a trend, with forest loss increasing by 2101 square kilometers per year.

The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 heralded the end of many unprofitable communist industries, along with unprecedented changes in land use. As the free-market economy took hold, large swathes of Soviet cropland were abandoned by farmers and reclaimed by nature, causing a headache for today’s policy-makers. Should it be replanted to feed hungry mouths, or left wild to act as a substantial sink for polluting carbon dioxide?

During the seven decades of its existence, the Soviet Union was a notorious terra incognita for Western geographers and map-makers. Information improved when remote-sensing satellites began to circle the globe, but the vast lands of Russia and her former satellite states only became accessible to Western scientists after the end of the cold war.

GLP-OSM 2014 Land Transformations: Between Global Challenges and Local Realities Humboldt University, Berlin | March 19th - 21st, 2014 The 2014 Global Land Project Open Science Meeting will synthesize and discuss the role of the land system as a platform for human-environment interactions, connecting local land use decisions to global impacts and responses. The abstract review process is completed and results have already posted to the corresponding authors. The complete list of accepted abstracts can be consulted on the conference website.

Ed. by Chen, Jiquan / Wan, Shiqiang / Henebry, Geoffrey / Qi, Jiaguo / Gutman, Garik / Sun, Ge / Kappas, Martin

Each summer, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Schloss Laxenburg near Vienna, Austria, hosts a selected group of graduate students from around the world in its Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP). These students work closely with an IIASA senior scientist mentor on a project proposed by the student, related to his or her graduate research, with the goal of a publishable paper.

PhD positions are available at the Landscape Ecology and Ecosystem Sciences (LEES http://research.eeescience.utoledo.edu/lees/) Lab at the University of Toledo to study ecosystem and societal functions on the Mongolian Plateau. The positions require the abilities to synthesize existing data and aid regional and continental up-scaling efforts in the context of climatic and socioeconomic changes.

GLP Special Issue on ‘Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability’

People are constantly changing the land surface through construction, agriculture, energy production, and other activities. Changes both in how land is used by people (land use) and in the vegetation, rock, buildings, and other physical material that cover the Earth's surface (land cover) can be described and future land change can be projected using land-change models (LCMs).