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Counting Crops in Space and Time: Large-Scale Analysis of Crop Diversity

Graham Macdonald

Abstract: The number and distribution of crops grown on the landscape is an important component of agricultural sustainability and resilience. A diverse mix of crops both spatially and temporally can have important implications for agricultural yields, soil health, and surrounding non-agricultural ecosystems. For this reason, a growing area of research seeks to examine the large-scale spatiotemporal patterns of crop diversity and links to this to underlying drivers within agricultural landscapes as well as broader implications for the food system. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our team’s ongoing work on crop diversity analysis in Canada, the United States, and globally. North American examples show how we can leverage remote sensing products and machine learning to examine field-level temporal crop sequences across millions of fields. We also identify some areas with uncharacteristically high spatial crop diversity, which can serve as a guidepost for informing potential to enhance crop diversity. Recent global work examines how crop diversity relates to land cover complexity across thousands of agricultural landscapes worldwide, including the presence of non-crop cover types and the distribution of field and patch sizes. I close with a discussion of how these insights can be applied to inform strategies toward crop diversification efforts at different scales, including a simple framework for assessing potential ‘low hanging fruit’ for enhancing crop diversity.

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The Gazan Riviera and other entrepreneurial imaginaries

Sarah Moser

Abstract: The scale and pace of destruction in Gaza since October 2023 has prompted many discussions about what post-war Gaza will look like, how it will be rebuilt, and by whom. Particularly since Trump became president for the second time in January 2025, Americans and Israeli officials have proposed a number of rebuilding schemes. These are premised on the belief that Gazans and other Palestinians residing in Gaza have no claim to the land or right to remain and are guided by an entrepreneurial logic that views Gaza as economically unproductive waterfront property that is wasted on Palestinians and requires ‘improvement’ in order to be profitable for investors. American and Israeli political elites imagine a sort of luxurious international ‘Gazan Riviera’ as a ‘space of exception’ where normal laws and regulations are suspended and which is regulated and governed using distinct legislation and autonomous non-state actors. In this research I trace some of the origins and antecedents of the Gazan Riviera scheme and examine some of the ways in which they are circulated. While these schemes are audacious and will break international law, I argue that they echo many recent urban mega-developments in which ethnic cleansing, land grabbing, and the establishment of zones governed by separate laws and regulations are increasingly normalized.

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