Global land use extent and dispersion within natural land cover using Landsat data

The conversion of natural land cover into human-dominated land use systems has significant impacts on the environment. Global mapping and monitoring of human-dominated land use extent via satellites provides an empirical basis for assessing land use pressures. Here, we present a novel 2019 global land cover, land use, and ecozone map derived from Landsat satellite imagery and topographical data using derived image feature spaces and algorithms suited per theme. From the map, we estimate the spatial extent and dispersion of land use disaggregated by climate domain and ecozone, where dispersion is the mean distance of land use to all land within a subregion. We find that percent of area under land use and distance to land use follow a power law that depicts an increasingly random spatial distribution of land use as it extends across lands of comparable development potential. For highly developed climate/ecozones, such as temperate and sub-tropical terra firma vegetation on low slopes, area under land use is contiguous and remnant natural land cover have low areal extent and high fragmentation. The tropics generally have the greatest potential for land use expansion, particularly in South America. An exception is Asian humid tropical terra firma vegetated lowland, which has land use intensities comparable to that of temperate breadbaskets such as the United States’ corn belt. Wetland extent is inversely proportional to land use extent within climate domains, indicating historical wetland loss for temperate, sub-tropical, and dry tropical biomes. Results highlight the need for planning efforts to preserve natural systems and associated ecosystem services. The demonstrated methods will be implemented operationally in quantifying global land change, enabling a monitoring framework for systematic assessments of the appropriation and restoration of natural land cover.

Grand Theft Terra Firma: Relationships and Cross-Cultural Art Production

Artists David Campion and Sandra Shields reflect on the role that relationships with Indigenous people played in shaping their installation Grand Theft Terra Firma which uses digital gaming to reframe the settlement of Canada as a heist perpetuated by the usual cast of colonial characters reimagined as villains. The artists provide a detailed account of the collaborative practice that became the means of co-creating photos with Stó:lō friends and neighbors as ‘actors.’ They share how relationships that grew over many years of time spent together were central to the understanding that became the foundation for the work as well as to the process of conceptualizing and executing the project.

Treaty-Based Regulation and Evidence-Extradition Agreements as Critical Tools in the Fight against International Criminal Wrongdoing

Draft Article 7 of the UN Draft Convention regarding Crimes Against Humanity provides the terra firma for States to establish and exercise a range of jurisdictional bases, including universal jurisdiction, to be reinforced by State-to-State agreements regarding evidence-extradition for the benefit of downstream truth and justice seeking projects. Legal analysis demonstrates there persists an insistence on treaty regulation and clearly particularised laws at local and international levels to successfully pursue international criminal accountability. Draft Article 7 will give credence to universal jurisdiction, complement the International Criminal Court’s workings and counter its temporal limitations, and negate politically-motivated invocation of the doctrine. A case study involving Australian extradition proceedings highlights how evidence can be obtained efficiently on the basis of a pre-existing bilateral agreement between culturally distinct States. Formal arrangements regarding evidence-exchange will espouse a greater willingness by States to cooperate across borders and will strengthen universality by taking some of the guess-work out of its exercise.

From Essence to Queery—Puzzling Over the Persistence of Identity

The following conversation between K. Merinda Simmons (University of Alabama) and Jeremy Posadas (Austin College) is an outgrowth of a roundtable on class, identity, and religion presented as part of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) meeting in November 2020. That discussion reflected participants’ respective approaches and research emphases, of course, but we all in one way or another focused our comments on the role of intersectionality (i.e., the approach to identity that sees social categories and systems of discrimination as structurally interconnected) within the academic study of religion. Using that theme as a starting point, the back-and-forth that follows brings our respective work in gender studies and queer theory into the mix. While exchanging the messages that became this text, we purposefully took an approach of “thinking out loud” and experimenting with ideas in formative stages. This embrace of what remains unsettled—in fact, the process of unsettling what scholars often take to be terra firma—is reflected in our tone and in our relative disinterest in structural linearity. We hope instead that this conversation might be read as exactly that: a conversation, necessarily partial and productively unfinished.

Curiosa pigmentazione cutanea

The case describes a girl with a benign skin condition named Terra Firma-Forme Dermatosis. The Terra Firma-Forme dermatosis is easy to recognize and has an easy resolution but however it has many differential diagnosis as acanthosis nigricans, tinea versicolor confluent and seborrheic keratosis. It is the typical example of “if you know it you recognize it”. A correct diagnosis brings indeed to a prompt resolution and avoids useless and inadequate exams to the patient.