Humans have altered the Earth’s surface for millennia, yet the speed of transformation during the past decades has been unprecedented. This came at considerable environmental costs and today global land-use change is considered one of the main factors driving greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. It is therefore paramount to reconstruct how humans have modified the Earth’s surface and to better understand which mechanisms lead to particularly drastic outcomes in order to identify strategies that allow human land use while minimizing the environmental footprint associated with it. Against this background, my overarching research goal is to characterize and map land-use processes and to establish causal linkages between these land-use process and the underlying drivers. I work quantitatively using large and complex datasets and by employing a wide range of concepts and methods from different disciplines, including Geography, remote sensing, agricultural economics, statistics and geoinformatics. My research can be categorized under three reseach themes.