Foodscapes - A global clustering of terrestrial food production systems (Foodscapes)

The production of food is at the heart of global sustainability challenges, with unsustainable practices being a major driver of biodiversity loss, green-house gas emissions and land degradation. The concept of foodscapes, defined as the characteristics of food production along biophysical and socio-economic gradients, could provide an entry point into navigating this nexus.

Here we provide a globally consistent approximation of the world’s foodscape classes through the integration of best available global data on biophysical and socio-economic factors so as to identify a minimum set of emergent clusters of food production systems. Such a clustering of homologous systems is necessarily coarse, while still being useful to identify possible leverage points for sustainable agriculture.

The data can be interactively explored (see below) and the layer is made openly downloaded here. Furthermore, as convenience, a layer further aggregated to reflect three levels of food production intensity is also provided in the same repository. A preprint describing the layer is currently in review. For more information, please see the website below.