title: An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands
Creators: name: Pratzer, Marie
name: Meyfroidt, Patrick
name: Antongiovanni, Marina
name: Aragon, Roxana
name: Baldi, Germán
name: Czaplicki Cabezas, Stasiek
name: De La Vega-Leinert, Cristina A.
name: Dhyani, Shalini
name: Diepart, Jean-Christophe
name: David Fernandez, Pedro
name: Garnett, Stephen T.
name: Gavier Pizarro, Gregorio I.
name: Kalam, Tamanna
name: Koulgi, Pradeep
name: Le Polain De Waroux, Yann
name: Marinaro, Sofia
name: Mastrangelo, Matias
name: Mueller, Daniel
name: Mueller, Robert
name: Murali, Ranjini
name: Nanni, Sofía
name: Nuñez-Regueiro, Mauricio
name: Prieto-Torres, David A.
name: Ratnam, Jayshree
name: Reddy, Chintala Sudhakar
name: Ribeiro, Natasha
name: Röder, Achim
name: Romero-Muñoz, Alfredo
name: Roy, Partha Sarathi
name: Rufin, Philippe
name: Rufino, Mariana
name: Sankaran, Mahesh
name: Torres, Ricardo
name: Vaidyanathan, Srinivas
name: Vallejos, Maria
name: Virah-Sawmy, Malika
name: Kuemmerle, Tobias
Publisher: name: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Conservation
subject: Land-use change
subject: Spatial planning
subject: Archetypes
subject: Regional case studies
subject: Tropical dry forests and savannas
subject: 333.7 Landflächen, Naturräume für Freizeit und Erholung, Naturreservate, Energie
subject: 550 Geowissenschaften
subject: 330 Wirtschaft

description: Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its mitigation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of contextual nuance widely acknowledged to be required for effective and just conservation action. To address these challenges, we have developed a conceptually consistent, scalable land system typology and demonstrated its usefulness for the world's tropical dry woodlands. Our typology identifies key land-use actors and activities that represent typical threats to biodiversity and opportunities for conservation action. We identified land systems in a hierarchical way, with a global level allowing for broad-scale planning and comparative work. Nested within it, a regionalized level provides social-ecological specificity and context. We showcase this regionalization for five hotspots of land-use change and biodiversity loss in dry woodlands in Argentina, Bolivia, Mozambique, India, and Cambodia. Unlike other approaches to present land use, our typology accounts for the complexity of overlapping land uses. This allows, for example, assessment of how conservation measures conflict with other land uses, understanding of the social-ecological co-benefits and trade-offs of area-based conservation, mapping of threats, or targeting area-based and actor-based conservation measures. Moreover, our framework enables cross-regional learning by revealing both commonalities and social-ecological differences, as we demonstrate here for the world's tropical dry woodlands. By bridging the gap between global, top-down, and regional, bottom-up initiatives, our framework enables more contextually appropriate sustainability planning across scales and more targeted and social-ecologically nuanced interventions.