Publications

Stephan Lutter, Victor Maus, Sebastian Luckeneder, Michael Tost. 2025. Increasing Water Use in Global Copper Production Threatens Freshwater Availability. Ecological Economic Papers. https://doi.org/10.57938/441b6e21-b914-4565-a2af-623f78ed92c6

Water input in copper mining varies substantially across sites worldwide, with implications for local sustainable resource management. We quantify water use in global copper mining at unprecedented spatial resolution, using machine learning to estimate site-level water withdrawal and identify geographic hotspots of pressure on water resources. Results reveal that global water intensity is two-fold higher than previously known....

Sebastian Luckeneder, Victor Maus, Juliana Siqueira-Gay, Tamás Krisztin, Michael Kuhn. 2025. Forest loss and uncertain economic gains from industrial and garimpo mining in Brazilian municipalities. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61930-8

Environmental and social risks in mining regions often juxtapose promises of local economic growth. Brazil, a major global mineral supplier and conservation leader, has pursued resource-led development despite mining’s threat to its forests. Yet, the efficacy of this development strategy is uncertain. In this study, we examine mining’s contribution to deforestation and regional economic growth in Brazil. For garimpo mining con...

Stefan Giljum, Victor Maus, Laura Sonter, Sebastian Luckeneder, Tim Werner, Stephan Lutter, Julia Gershenzon, Megan J. Cole, Juliana Siqueira-Gay, Anthony Bebbington. 2025. Metal mining is a global driver of environmental change. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00683-w

Global metal extraction is increasing, owing to rising mineral demands from infrastructure development and the growing need for metal-intensive renewable energy technologies to mitigate climate change and phase out coal mining. However, extraction of metal ores also drives impacts on land use, water resources and biodiversity. In this Review, we evaluate mining trends of 47 metal ores between 1970 and 2022 and explore the envi...

Valentin Seidler, Edson C. Utazi, Amelia B. Finaret, Sebastian Luckeneder, Gregor Zens, Maksym Bodarenko, Abigail W. Smith, Sarah E. K. Bradley, Andrew J. Tatem, Patrick Webb. 2025. Subnational variations in the quality of household survey data in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58776-5

Nationally representative household surveys collect geocoded data that are vital to tackling health and other development challenges in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars and practitioners generally assume uniform data quality but subnational variation of errors in household data has never been investigated at high spatial resolution. Here, we explore within-country variation in the quality of most recent household surveys for 35 Af...

Xander Huggins, Tom Gleeson, James S Famiglietti, Robert Reinecke, Daniel Zamrsky, Thorsten Wagener, Richard G Taylor, Megan Konar, Claudia Ruz Vargas, Miina Porkka, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Inge de Graaf, Mark Cuthbert, Sara Lindersson, Yoshihide Wada, Marc F P Bierkens, Yadu Pokhrel, Juan Rocha, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Matti Kummu, Grant Ferguson, Abhijit Mukherjee, Min-Hui Lo, Bridget R Scanlon, Mark S Johnson, Chunmiao Zheng. 2025. A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social–ecological systems. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adf127

Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of the water cycle and social–ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly focuses on groundwater’s interactions wit...

Kathryn Bjorklund, Melissa A. Barton, Stefan Daume, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen. 2025. Tracking phases of the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) invasion across multiple continents using news media. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7393018/v1

Understanding the dynamics of cascading social-ecological impacts associated with emerging pests and pathogens is key for addressing the challenges they introduce in an ever more interconnected and rapidly changing world. Here, we used topic modeling of digital news articles to investigate the potential cascading social-ecological impacts associated with the ongoing fall armyworm invasion of multiple geographic regions. We ide...

Nielja Knecht, Romi Amilia Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4902

Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down (CSD) have been applied widely to r...

Erica von Essen, Henriette Wathne Gelink, Helene Figari, Olve Krange. 2025. The beast from the east: Preparing for cross-border wild boars in Norway. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104421

Managing migrating species is a geobiopolitical undertaking: with this is meant that administrating life (and death) across borders has political implications between neighboring countries. When a species immigrates, or is moved anthropogenically, its sudden presence can trigger defensive-nativist responses from its new destination. Sometimes its mere risk is enough to generate anxiety. This is true both of invasive alien spec...

Benjamin L. Allen, Andrew J. Abraham, Robert Arlinghaus, Jerrold L. Belant, Daniel T. Blumstein, Christopher Bobier, Michael J. Bodenchuk, Marcus Clauss, Stuart J. Dawson, Stuart W. G. Derbyshire, Sam M. Ferreira, Peter J. S. Fleming, Tim Forssman, Vanessa Gorecki, Christian Gortázar, Andrea S. Griffin, Jordan O. Hampton, Peter M. Haswell, Graham I. H. Kerley, Christopher H. Lean, Frédéric Leroy, John D. C. Linnell, Kate Lynch, Celesté Maré, Haemish Melville, Liaan Minnie, Yoshan Moodley, Danial Nayeri, M. Justin O’Riain, Dan Parker, Stéphanie Périquet-Pearce, Gilbert Proulx, Frans G. T. Radloff, Alexander Schwab, Sarah-Anne Jeanetta Selier, Samuel Shephard, Michael J. Somers, T. Adam Van Wart, Kurt C. Vercauteren, Erica von Essen. 2025. Ethical arguments that support intentional animal killing. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2025.1684894

Killing animals is a ubiquitous human activity consistent with our predatory and competitive ecological roles within the global food web. However, this reality does not automatically justify the moral permissibility of the various ways and reasons why humans kill animals – additional ethical arguments are required. Multiple ethical theories or frameworks provide guidance on this subject, and here we explore the permissibility ...

Hanna L. Pettersson, Erica Von Essen. 2025. Now What? The Conundrum of Successful Recovery of Wolves and Other Species for European Conservation. Conservation Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13143

The recent decision to downlist the wolf from a “strictly protected” to “protected” status in the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive marks a turning point for European conservation. While reflecting wolves' recovery, the shift has illuminated a conundrum within existing conservation frameworks: No species has ever been downlisted before, despite a remarkable wildlife comeback over recent decades. Moreover, the downlisting ...