Trase is a data-driven transparency initiative that maps the international trade and financing of agricultural commodities, providing tools that enable companies, financial institutions and governments to address tropical deforestation.

Understanding the role of interspecific interactions in shaping ecological communities is one of the central goals in community ecology. In fungal communities, measuring interspecific interactions directly is challenging because these communities are composed of large numbers of species, many of which are unculturable. An indirect way of assessing the role of interspecific interactions in determining community structure is to identify the species co-occurrences that are not constrained by the environmental conditions. In this study, we...

Nearly three billion people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) rely on polluting fuels, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths annually. Polluting fuels also emit short-lived climate forcers and greenhouse gases (GHGs). Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and grid-based electricity are scalable alternatives to polluting fuels but have raised climate and health concerns. Here, we compare emissions and climate impacts of a business-as-usual household cooking fuel trajectory to four large-scale transitions to gas and/or grid electricity...

Agricultural land use is a primary driver of environmental impacts on streams. However, the causal processes that shape these impacts operate through multiple pathways and at several spatial scales. This complexity undermines the development of more effective management approaches, and illustrates the need for more in-depth studies to assess the mechanisms that determine changes in stream biodiversity. Here we present results of the most comprehensive multi-scale assessment of the biological condition of streams in the...

Dead wood (DW) provides critical habitat for thousands of species in forests, but its amount, quality and diversity have been heavily reduced by forestry. Therefore, interventions aiming to increase DW might be necessary to support its associated biodiversity, even in protected forests, which may be former production forests. Our aim was to synthesise the current state of knowledge drawn from replicated experimental studies into solid quantitative evidence of the effects of DW manipulation on forest...

1.Agricultural expansion and intensification are major threats to tropical biodiversity. In addition to the direct removal of native vegetation, agricultural expansion often elicits other human-induced disturbances, many of which are poorly addressed by existing environmental legislation and conservation programmes. This is particularly true for tropical freshwater systems, where there is considerable uncertainty about whether a legislative focus on protecting riparian vegetation is sufficient to conserve stream fauna. 2.To assess the extent to which stream fish...

1. Further progress in reducing biodiversity loss relies on the improved quantification of the connections between drivers of habitat loss and subsequent biodiversity impacts. To this end, biodiversity impact metrics should be able to report linked trends in specific human activities and changes in biodiversity state, accounting for both the ecology of different species, and the cumulative effects of historical habitat losses. These characteristics are not currently captured within a single metric. 2. Here we...

Reconstructing ecological niche evolution can provide insight into the biogeography and diversification of evolving lineages. However, comparative phylogenetic methods can infer the history of ecological niche evolution inaccurately because (1) species’ niches are often poorly characterized; and (2) phylogenetic comparative methods rely on niche summary statistics rather than full estimates of species’ environmental tolerances. Here we propose a new framework for coding ecological niches and reconstructing their evolution that explicitly acknowledges and incorporates the uncertainty...

Modelled average percentage yield loss due to ground-level ozone pollution (per 1 degree by 1 degree grid cell) are presented for the crops maize (Zea mays), rice (Oryza sativa), soybean (Glycine max) and wheat (Triticum aestivum) for the period 2010-2012. Data are on a global scale, based on the distribution of production for each crop, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) crop production data for the year 2000. Modelled...

This Trase dataset describes the supply chain of Argentinean soybeans from departments of production to countries of import. The data provides volumes (in tonnes) and value of soy exports (in US dollars), as well as the deforestation exposure in the supply chain of companies and countries.