Marie-Claude spent the summer conducting her Master's fieldwork in the indigenous Emberá community of Ipetí in Panamá. There, she asked people about the history of their livelihoods and about their relationship to a reforestation (REDD+) project that took place in the community. With this information, she is hoping to answer questions about land-use and livelihood change in the community, and about the impacts and possible side-effects of the reforestation project. Stay tuned for her results!

Led by our collaborators at Humboldt University Berlin, this new paper to which Yann contributed develops a set of metrics to characterize agricultural frontiers, in addition to proposing a new high-resolution reconstruction of land-use/cover change in the Gran Chaco 1985 to 2020. The analysis shows that nearly 30% of Chaco woodlands were lost since 1985, with a  major increase in deforestation during the pandemic. It also shows that post-deforestation land-use changes are widespread (mainly cattle ranching to cropping) but that many deforested areas are never used for agriculture. The study shows how frontier metrics can capture and structure this diversity to uncover major patterns of human–nature interactions, which can be used to guide spatially-targeted policies. The paper can be found here.