DEPOPLAND

DEPOPLAND addresses one of the most profound global transformations of the 21st century: rural depopulation. As rural-to-urban migration accelerates and global population decline sets in, many rural areas face sustained population loss. This trend is reshaping landscapes and communities, yet its ecological and social consequences remain poorly understood. Rural landscapes are inherently coupled social–ecological systems, where human well-being and ecological processes are deeply intertwined. When population decline occurs, these systems undergo profound changes, ranging from land abandonment, and landscape homogenisation to the loss of public services, and social cohesion.

Existing research often examines these dynamics in isolation or within specific geographic contexts, resulting in fragmented knowledge and limited generalizability. Most studies focus on either ecological or social outcomes, rarely integrating both dimensions or exploring their interactions.

DEPOPLAND aims to identify and compare trajectories of ecological conditions and community well-being in depopulating rural landscapes worldwide, and uncover the drivers shaping these trajectories to inform strategies that deliver benefits for both people and nature. Multidecadal trajectories and their drivers will be assessed with an innovative mix of methods that are rarely combined, including spatial-temporal analyses of remote sensing products, natural language processing (NLP), and fuzzy cognitive mapping.

To support the project’s interdisciplinary goals, DEPOPLAND brings together leading experts in landscape ecology, physical and human geography, land system science, and computational linguistics from ETH Zurich, and the Universities of Zurich, Kassel and Göttingen.

The project’s research objectives will be addressed in five work packages (WPs):

• WP1 will identify rural landscapes that have experienced sustained population decline or growth by analysing global population datasets and literature, enabling a systematic, worldwide comparison of these landscapes.
• WP2 will analyse ecological change in rural landscapes by determining long-term changes in landscape composition and configuration. This includes harmonizing global time series of land use, land cover, and land-use intensity, and developing novel multidecadal time series of landscape heterogeneity derived from satellite imagery.
• WP3 will assess changes in community well-being across rural landscapes. This includes combining objective well-being indicators from global databases with subjective well-being estimates derived from NLP-based analysis of the GDELT (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone) news archive, unlocking its untapped potential for global social research.
• WP4 will examine synergies and trade-offs between ecological and well-being change in depopulating rural landscapes. This involves identifying shared drivers and validating relationships through expert-informed fuzzy cognitive mapping, moving beyond correlation-based methods to uncover causal drivers and context-specific intervention points.
• WP5 will synthesize project findings into a final scientific publication and, following a concluding online workshop, produce a policy brief for decision-makers.

DEPOPLAND is expected to deliver major scientific advances across multiple fields. It will push the boundaries of landscape ecology by implementing global-scale methods to assess multidecadal changes in landscape heterogeneity using satellite imagery, pioneer the application of GDELT for retrospective well-being estimation, and advance social-ecological systems research by integrating global analyses with participatory fuzzy cognitive mapping. By developing new methods and knowledge to guide sustainable transformations in depopulating rural landscapes, DEPOPLAND offers timely contributions to a pressing global challenge.