This article offers a way to measure agreement in participatory mapping. We asked subject matter experts (SMEs) to draw where Sudanese ethnic groups were located on a map. We then used an eigenanalysis approach to determine whether SMEs agreed on the location of ethnic groups. We used minimum residual factor analysis to assess the extent of interinformant agreement among SMEs' judgments of four ethnic groups' spatial locations. Although we found little evidence of the lumper/splitter problem, some SMEs drew larger polygons than others, and we provide directions on how to reduce this potential bias. Finally, the results of the geospatial agreement analysis were validated through a comparison of other sources of geospatial data for three of the four ethnic groups.

Vina et al. imply that native forests account for China's marked increase in tree cover and that tree plantations play a minimal role. All 71 tweets linked to the article reinforce the idea that China's native forests are returning, whereas a review of theirmethodology indicates that it is not likely accurate. Referring news articles (n = 19) were dominated by terms associated with native forests, whereas tree plantations were rarely mentioned.

Food lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. We use a social-ecological framework to illustrate how major changes to the volume, nutrition and safety of food systems between 1961 and today impact health and sustainability. These changes have almost halved undernutrition while doubling the proportion who are overweight. They have also resulted in reduced resilience of the biosphere, pushing four out of six analysed planetary boundaries across the safe operating space of the biosphere. Our analysis further illustrates that consumers and producers have become more distant from one another, with substantial power consolidated within a small group of key actors. Solutions include a shift from a volume-focused production system to focus on quality, nutrition, resource use efficiency, and reduced antimicrobial use. To achieve this, we need to rewire food systems in ways that enhance transparency between producers and consumers, mobilize key actors to become biosphere stewards, and re-connect people to the biosphere.

We show how land-use change can affect fisher-harvesting behavior. We test whether fisher harvesting behavior can be predicted by landscape change patterns at local (similar to 200 km) and regional (similar to 1200 km) levels. Our data suggest that fishers harvesting in areas near tree plantations reduced benthic-invertebrate harvests in favor of demersal and pelagic finfish that are usually located further offshore. Fishers' management areas, which were near tree plantations, had higher chlorophyll-a values, and contained shellfish with more endobionts. Technology (owning a boat) and experience (age, years fishing, and alternative livelihoods) explained little in fisher-harvesting behavior. The flagship Chilean fisheries management program and seafood companies sourcing from these areas will need to respond to these new challenges. Despite complexities in designing cross-scale, social-ecological studies, we can no longer ignore the interconnectedness of commodities in the biosphere.

We report on a rapid and practical method to assess social dimensions of performance in small-scale and industrial fisheries globally (Social Wellbeing in Fisheries Tool (SWIFT)). SWIFT incorporates aspects of security (fairness and stability of earnings, benefits of employment to local fishing communities, worker protection, and personal safety and health in communities associated with fisheries); flexibility (including opportunity for economic advancement); and the fishery's social viability (including whether the fishery is recruiting new harvesters and diverse age classes of workers, whether women's participation and leadership in global production networks are on an upward trajectory.). We build on resilience research by conceptualizing wellbeing in terms of security, flexibility, and viability, and assessing wellbeing at individual, community, and system levels. SWIFT makes social performance measures more broadly accessible to global production networks, incorporates an everyday understanding of wellbeing for people involved in the seafood industry, and helps put social sustainability into measurable terms that are relevant for businesses.

Global programs are calling to increase tree cover, including plantations, which supply global pulp and wood demand, energy, food, and carbon markets. Tree plantations that replace native forests, cultivated agriculture, or previously cleared land are essentially commodity crops with global market drivers, and do not provide the same ecosystem services as native forests. Nonetheless, they are counted as forest by global programs. We test whether 1) the forest transitions framework (FTF), which typically explains reforestation, adequately describes the socio-economic drivers of plantation establishment and 2) descriptions of the effects of land cover change on ecological processes are obscured when tree plantation and native forest classes are aggregated. We used longitudinal multi-temporal satellite imagery (1985-2001) to map and analyze plantation systems across a 35,853 km(2) area in southern Chile at the plantation frontier. As predicted by the FTF, plantations were established in foothills of predominantly agricultural watersheds rather than in watersheds dominated by native forests or in flat, agriculturally productive areas. Half of the plantations were planted on agricultural or cleared lands that were deforested years ago. Counter to predictions of the FTF, the other half of the plantations replaced native forests. Tree plantations were not associated with rural population loss; instead their establishment was related to the amount of potential usable land. We find that when native forests and tree plantation classes are disaggregated, land in coastal catchments that were converted to tree plantation is related to lower quality nearshore resources; analyses that aggregate plantations with native forests obscure this effect.

We examined hunters' perceptions of fauna to see if expert hunters and other hunters perceive wildlife abundance similarly. We used cultural consensus analysis (CCA) to assess the knowledge of 25 hunters in the Bolivian Amazon about the abundance of 38 animals. CCA indicated highly shared beliefs among hunters concerning wildlife abundance (average agreement=.62). However, expert hunters (as judged by their reported successful hunts of rare species, having hunted recently, and consuming more game in their diet) perceived more animals as abundant than did non-experts, although they all shared the same model. Since the expert hunters did not always agree on which species was more abundant, they had low cultural knowledge scores in CCA results. These experts may be unwilling to curtail hunting efforts on key species that they perceive to be abundant.