> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://lss-lab.kankyo.tohoku.ac.jp/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Land System Sustainability Lab

> Estoque Lab — Department of Frontier Sciences for Advanced Environment, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University

We are a group of land-system scientists and remote-sensing researchers at Tohoku University.
We study how land is used and how it changes — and what those changes mean for biodiversity,
ecosystem services, and human wellbeing.

## What we do

Our research agenda is **advancing theory and spatial thinking to better understand social–ecological
systems, promote land system sustainability, and improve human well-being.**

Land use is where people and nature meet. It drives biodiversity loss and carbon emissions, and it
is also one of the largest levers we have for addressing them. We treat land as a
**social–ecological system**: a system in which human decisions and ecological processes shape each
other across space and time.

Our work is quantitative and spatially explicit. We combine satellite Earth observation, geospatial
data science, spatial statistics, land-system modelling, and deep learning, and we work from local
to global scales.

<Note>
  Three questions run through everything we do:

  * **How and why do land systems change?**
  * **Who is affected — and how are biodiversity, ecosystem services, and wellbeing impacted?**
  * **Which strategies can reconcile conservation, climate adaptation, and other land uses?**
</Note>

## Research themes

<Frame caption="The lab's research agenda and three core research themes.">
  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/tohoku-university-land-system-sustainability-lab/zaS5X8Non7A7hSQr/images/research-agenda.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=zaS5X8Non7A7hSQr&q=85&s=738f12a701e394ceca04b849e0cbcd0f" alt="Diagram of the Land System Sustainability Lab research agenda, showing three core research themes: advancing theory and methods, understanding social–ecological systems, and assessing human well-being, each with example topics." width="2000" height="1125" data-path="images/research-agenda.png" />
</Frame>

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Theme 1 · Advance theory and methods" icon="compass" href="/en/research/land-system-dynamics">
    Land system dynamics and telecoupled interactions — forest transition theory, land-use
    displacement, nexus approaches, and Geo-AI.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Theme 2 · Understand social–ecological systems" icon="leaf" href="/en/research/social-ecological-systems">
    Interactions between social and ecological processes, and what they mean for sustainability.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Theme 3 · Assess human well-being" icon="users" href="/en/research/human-wellbeing">
    How environmental change and social–ecological dynamics shape human well-being across
    spatiotemporal scales.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Recent news

* **26–27 August 2026** — Asst. Prof. Ahmed Derdouri participates in the [International Symposium on Integrated
  Use of Projected Population Mesh Data in Japan](/en/news#27-august-2026) at FRIS, Tohoku University,
  Sendai.
* **3–7 August 2026** — Assoc. Prof. Ronald C. Estoque participates in the [Fourth Lead Author Meeting of the
  IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities](/en/news#7-august-2026) in Bhopal, India.
* **4 August 2026** — Asst. Prof. Ahmed Derdouri presents "Simulating Japan's Land-Use Futures with a Scalable
  Agent-Based Modelling Framework" at [The 1st Climate Change Adaptation Research Meeting](/en/news#4-august-2026)
  at the University of Tokyo.

[All news →](/en/news)

## Where we are

We are based on the **Aobayama campus** of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, in the Graduate
School of Environmental Studies.

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Meet the team" icon="users" href="/en/people/current">
    Faculty, researchers, and staff.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Join the lab" icon="user-plus" href="/en/join">
    Opportunities for prospective students and collaborators.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>