Remote sensing of agricultural change and biodiversity: detecting expansion, intensification, and abandonment

Remote sensing of agricultural change is essential for understanding how food production affects biodiversity. Agricultural expansion and intensification can drive habitat conversion, degradation, and fragmentation. However, agricultural change also includes farmland abandonment and the destocking of extensive livestock systems, which can have varied ecological effects. Abandonment may create opportunities for habitat recovery or pose new conservation challenges, while reduced grazing can alter the structure and biodiversity of open landscapes. Monitoring has often focused on the expansion and intensification of agriculture, leaving less understanding of how abandonment and destocking affect habitats, species, and ecosystem function. Remote sensing, combined with ecological and socioeconomic data, can help detect these changes and assess their consequences across different places and scales.This Research Topic aims to advance the use of remote sensing and spatial analysis to detect agricultural expansion, intensification, farmland abandonment, and livestock destocking, and to assess their consequences for biodiversity. It will bring together research that links Earth observation with field data, biodiversity records, spatial modelling, and information on socioeconomic and policy drivers. The Topic seeks to improve understanding of how these changes affect habitat extent, quality, and connectivity, and how monitoring can inform conservation and land-use decisions.To gather further insights into how remote sensing can detect and assess the biodiversity effects of agricultural change, this Research Topic welcomes studies across terrestrial ecosystems and spatial scales. It prioritizes research that connects observed land-use transitions with ecological outcomes or the drivers shaping them. Themes include, but are not limited to:• Mapping agricultural expansion and the conversion of natural and semi-natural habitats to cropland or pasture.• Detecting agricultural intensification and assessing its effects on habitat quality, vegetation structure, and landscape complexity.• Monitoring farmland abandonment, livestock destocking, and subsequent land-cover or ecosystem changes.• Assessing biodiversity responses, including changes in species distributions, habitat suitability, and landscape connectivity.• Attributing agricultural transitions to policy, market, trade, demographic, and land-management drivers.• Evaluating conservation policies, protected areas, and supply-chain commitments using Earth observation data.• Combining remote sensing with field surveys, biodiversity databases, socioeconomic data, and spatial modelling.• Assessing the validation, uncertainty, and limitations of remote-sensing approaches to monitoring agricultural change and biodiversity. Topic editors: Hamisai Hamandawana, Martin Munashe Chari, Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87065/remote-sensing-of-agricultural-change-and-biodiversity-detecting-expansion-intensification-and-abandonment