Agriculture is the dominant driver of terrestrial ecological change, and its impacts will continue to grow in the next few decades as our demands for food, fuel, and fiber increase. I am primarily interested in understanding how this continued agricultural development can be achieved for substantially lower environmental, and thus social, cost. My work investigates three inter-related aspects of this problem: Finding tradeoffs that allow us to meet our rapidly increasing agricultural demands while minimizing their ecological costs, understanding the drivers of agricultural change, developing the datasets and methods needed to conduct this research. I study these issues across multiple scales of time and space, ranging from continental perspectives down to the level of individual rare species. I focus primarily on sub-Saharan Africa, where agricultural development is likely to be most rapid in the coming decades.