Researchers from NASA Harvest and NASA LCLUC worked on estimating Ukraine wheat production during the war using satellite data. Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fueled widespread concern about the effects on the country’s farming sector. In the early days of the crisis, food security specialists wondered if Ukrainian farmers would be able to harvest the wheat and barley they had planted the previous fall. They also worried that declining grain exports from Ukraine might throw global markets into turmoil and trigger food shortages continents away.

A study led by LCLUC PI Dr. Jefferson Fox (East West Center) and his team was featured in the New York Times. Nepal is showing results after decades of effort, a rare success story in a world of climate disasters and despair. Community-managed forests now account for more than a third of Nepal’s forest cover, which has grown by about 22 percent since 1988, according to government data. Independent studies also confirm that greenery in Nepal has sprung back, with forests now covering 45 percent of the country’s land.

Much of the tree growth in the tropics in the first decade of the century consists of plantations — not natural forest. The LCLUC project  findings by PI Nick Magliocca, Co-I Mathew Fagan and team got featured in Nature's Research Highlights.

Commercial tree plantations make up a much larger share of the increase in tree cover in the tropics between 2000 and 2012 than national data would indicate1.