Maize yield prediction and condition monitoring at the sub-county scale in Kenya: synthesis of remote sensing information and crop modeling.

Agricultural production assessments are crucial for formulating strategies for closing yield gaps and enhancing production efficiencies. While in situ crop yield measurements can provide valuable and accurate information, such approaches are costly and lack scalability for large-scale assessments. Therefore, crop modeling and remote sensing (RS) technologies are essential for assessing crop conditions and predicting yields at larger scales. In this study, we combined RS and a crop growth model to assess phenology, evapotranspiration (ET), and yield dynamics at grid and sub-county scales in Kenya. We synthesized RS information from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Water Productivity Open-access portal (WaPOR) to retrieve sowing date information for driving the model simulations. The findings showed that grid-scale management information and progressive crop growth could be accurately derived, reducing the model output uncertainties. Performance assessment of the modeled phenology yielded satisfactory accuracies at the sub-county scale during two representative seasons. The agreement between the simulated ET and yield was improved with the combined RS-crop model approach relative to the crop model only, demonstrating the value of additional large-scale RS information. The proposed approach supports crop yield estimation in data-scarce environments and provides valuable insights for agricultural resource management enabling countermeasures, especially when shortages are perceived in advance, thus enhancing agricultural production.

Identifying clusters of precipitation for the Brazilian Legal Amazon based on magnitude of trends and its correlation with sea surface temperature.

Prioritizing watershed management interventions relies on delineating homogeneous precipitation regions. In this study, we identify these regions in the Brazilian Legal Amazon based on the magnitude of Sen's Slope trends using annual precipitation data from September to August, employing the Google Earth Engine platform. Utilizing the silhouette method, we determine four distinct clusters representing zones of homogeneous precipitation patterns. Cluster 0 exhibits a significant median increase in precipitation of 3.20 mm year-1 over the period from 1981 to 2020. Cluster 1 shows a notable increase of 8.13 mm year-1, while Clusters 2 and 3 demonstrate reductions in precipitation of - 1.61 mm year-1 and - 3.87 mm year-1, respectively, all statistically significant. Notably, the region known as the arc of deforestation falls within Cluster 2, indicating a concerning trend of reduced precipitation. Additionally, our analysis reveals significant correlations between Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in various oceanic regions and precipitation patterns over the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Particularly noteworthy is the strong positive correlation with SST in the South Atlantic, while negative correlations are observed with SST in the South Pacific and North Atlantic. These findings provide valuable insights for enhancing climate adaptation strategies in the Brazilian Legal Amazon region.

Lifetime Employment Trajectories and Cancer: A Population-Based Cohort Study.

Working life is associated with lifestyle, screening uptake, and occupational health risks that may explain differences in cancer onset. To better understand the association between working life and cancer risk, we need to account for the entire employment history. We investigated whether lifetime employment trajectories are associated with cancer risk. We used data from 6,809 women and 5,716 men, average age 70 years, from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe. Employment history from age 16 to 65 was collected retrospectively using a life calendar and trajectories were constructed using sequence analysis. Associations between employment trajectories and self-reported cancer were assessed using logistic regression. We identified eight employment trajectories for women and two for men. Among women, the risk of cancer was higher in the trajectories "Mainly full-time to home/family", "Full-time or home/family to part-time", "Mainly full-time", and "Other" compared with the "Mainly home/family" trajectory. Among men, the risk of cancer was lower in the "Mainly self-employment" trajectory compared with "Mainly full-time". We could show how employment trajectories were associated with cancer risk, underlining the potential of sequence analysis for life course epidemiology. More research is needed to understand these associations and determine if causal relationships exist.

Impact of forest landscape restoration in combating soil erosion in the Lake Abaya catchment, Southern Ethiopia.

As an effect of forest degradation, soil erosion is among Ethiopia's most pressing environmental challenges and a major threat to food security where it could potentially compromise the ecosystem functions and services. As the effects of soil erosion intensify, the landscape's capacity to support ecosystem functions and services is compromised. Exploring the ecological implications of soil erosion is crucial. This study investigated the soil loss and land degradation in the Lake Abaya catchment to explore forest landscape restoration (FLR) implementation as a possible countermeasure to the effects. The study used a geographic information system (GIS)-based approach of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) to determine the potential annual soil loss and develop an erosion risk map. Results show that 13% of the catchment, which accounts for approximately 110,000 ha, is under high erosion risk of exceeding the average annual tolerable soil loss of 10 t/ha/year. Allocation of land on steep slopes to crop production is the major reason for the calculated high erosion risk in the catchment. A scenario-based analysis was implemented following the slope-based land-use allocation proposal indicated in the Rural Land Use Proclamation 456/2005 of Ethiopia. The scenario analysis resulted in a reversal erosion effect whereby an estimated 3000 t/ha/year of soil loss in the catchment. Thus, FLR activities hold great potential for minimizing soil loss and contributing to supporting functioning and providing ecosystem services. Tree-based agroforestry systems are among the key FLR measures championed in highly degraded landscapes in Ethiopia. This study helps policymakers and FLR implementors identify erosion risk areas for future FLR activities. Thereby, it contributes to achieving the country's restoration commitment.

Participatory and Spatially Explicit Assessment to Envision the Future of Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Scenarios on Selected Ecosystem Services in Southwestern Ghana.

Settlement expansion and commercial agriculture affect landscape sustainability and ecosystem service provision. Integrated landscape approaches are promoted to negotiate trade-offs between competing land uses and their reconciliation. Incorporating local perceptions of landscape dynamics as basis for such negotiations is particularly relevant for sub-Saharan Africa, where most people depend on natural ecosystems for livelihoods and well-being. This study applied participatory scenario building and spatially explicit simulation to unravel perceptions of the potential impact of rubber and settlement expansion on the provision of selected ecosystem services in southwestern Ghana under a business-as-usual scenario. We collected data in workshops and expert surveys on locally relevant ecosystem services, their indicator values, and the probable land-use transitions. The data was translated into an assessment matrix and integrated into a spatially explicit modeling platform, allowing visualization and comparison of the impact on ecosystem service provision of land-use scenarios under rubber plantation and settlement expansion. The results show the capacity of current (2020) and future land-use patterns to provide locally relevant ecosystem services, indicating a decline in capacity of ecosystem service provisioning in the future compared to the 2020 land-use patterns, a threat to the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. This highlights urgent need for policies and measures to control the drivers of land-use/land-cover change. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of diversifying land-use/land-cover types for sustainable landscape development. The paper contributes new insights into how spatially explicit and semi-quantitative methods can make stakeholder perceptions of landscape dynamics explicit as a basis for implementing integrated landscape approaches.

Designing mosaic landscapes for sustainable outcome: Evaluating land-use options on ecosystem service provisioning in southwestern Ghana.

The landscape in southwestern Ghana faces rampant modification due to socio-economic activities, posing threats to ecosystem service provision and environmental sustainability. Addressing these threats involves empowering land-use actors to design landscapes that offer multiple benefits concurrently. This study employs a geodesign framework, integrating participatory ecosystem service assessment and spatial simulations. This geodesign framework aims to design the landscape in a collaborative manner in a way that supports multiple benefits concurrently, mitigating the threats posed by landscape modification. Reflecting on local land-use perceptions during a workshop, we developed land-use options and land management strategies based on selected land-cover types. We identified urban greens, open space restoration, rubber mixed-stands, mangrove restoration, selective-cutting land preparation, soil conservation, and relay cropping as land-use options to target selected land-cover types of shrubland, cropland, smallholder rubber, smallholder palm, wetland, and settlement. The land management strategies translated into landscape scenarios based on local need conditions. We generated the local need conditions which translated into the landscape scenarios by reflecting on the location of land-cover types, 'change-effect' conditions within rubber, settlement, and cropland, and 'no-change'conditions within cropland. Results indicate synergies between the created landscape scenarios and ecosystem service provisioning, with 'no-change' within cropland providing the highest synergy and 'change-effect' within rubber providing the least synergy. Spatial modeling of local perceptions forms the novelty of this study, as the fusion of participatory assessments and spatial modeling allows for a more holistic understanding of the landscape, its services, and the potential implications of different management strategies. The geodesign framework facilitated the design of the complex heterogeneous landscape to visualize possibilities of maximizing multiple benefits and can be used for future planning on the landscape.

Assessing impacts of COVID-19 and their responses among smallholder farmers in Brazil, Madagascar and Tanzania.

This study investigates the impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on smallholder farmers and their coping strategies in three contrasting Low- and Middle-Income Countries. The case studies include Brazil (South region), Madagascar (Atsimo Atsinanana region), and Tanzania (Morogoro/Eastern Tanzania). These countries were chosen because i) the economies are strongly influenced by the agricultural sector; ii) their national food security is strongly affected by smallholder production, and, iii) they represent a set of contrasting government responses to COVID-19 including the denial of the pandemic. Data were collected through semi-structured household interviews in all three countries in rural areas. COVID-19 induced effects were found in all three countries, including in Brazil and Tanzania where both national governments initially neglected the existence of COVID-19 and introduced few containment measures only. Here, mobility and trade restrictions of other countries impact also on agricultural trade and production in countries in which governments took less action to COVID-19 and also people remained home and practiced social distancing even if no official government policy was issued. The findings in all three countries suggest that the COVID-19 crisis had negatively affected smallholders' agricultural production, leading to a vicious cycle of low production, low incomes, and higher food insecurity. Results of this study raise the thorny issue of how best to balance containment of pandemic and future shocks against the well-being of the vulnerable rural population in lower- and middle-income countries; especially considering also the degree of global interconnected and the potential of polices to effect people beyond the national scale.