Changes In Land Use And Land Cover

This book presents recent estimates on the rate of change of major land classes. Aggregated globally, multiple impacts of local land changes are shown to significantly affect central aspects of Earth System functioning. The book offers innovative developments and applications in the fields of modeling and scenario construction. Conclusions are also drawn about the most pressing implications for the design of appropriate intervention policies.

This book analyses the impact of human activities on the Earth's surface and environment.

Land use and land cover (LULC) as well as its changes (LUCC) are an interplay between bio-geophysical characteristics of the landscape and climate as well as the complex human interaction including its different patterns of utilization superimposed on the natural vegetation. LULC is a core information layer for a variety of scientific and administrative tasks(e.g. hydrological modelling, climate models, land use planning).In particular in the context of climate change with its impacts on socio-economic, socio-ecologic systems as well as ecosystem services precise information on LULC and LUCC are mandatory baseline datasets required over large areas. Remote sensing can provide such information on different levels of detail and in a homogeneous and reliable way. Hence, LULC mapping can be regarded as a prototype for integrated approaches based on spaceborne and airborne remote sensing techniques combined with field observations. The book provides for the first time a comprehensive view of various LULC activities focusing on European initiatives, such as the LUCAS surveys, the CORINE land covers, the ESA/EU GMES program and its resulting Fast-Track- and Downstream Services, the EU JRC Global Land Cover, the ESA GlobCover project as well as the ESA initiative on Essential Climate Variables. All have and are producing highly appreciated land cover products. The book will cover the operational approaches, but also review current state-of-the-art scientific methodologies and recommendations for this field. It opens the view with best-practice examples that lead to a view that exceeds pure mapping, but to investigate into drivers and causes as well as future projections.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, but it is posing new challenges to humans and natural ecosystems in the 21st century. From climate change to increasingly mobile human populations to the global economy, the relationship between humans and their environment is being modified in ways that will have long-term impacts on ecological health, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, population vulnerability, and sustainability. These changes and challenges are perhaps nowhere more evident than in island ecosystems. Buffeted by rising ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, sea-level rise, climate change, tourism, population migration, invasive species, and resource limitations, islands represent both the greatest vulnerability to globalization and also the greatest scientific opportunity to study the significance of global changes on ecosystem processes, human-environment interactions, conservation, environmental policy, and island sustainability. In this book, we study islands through the lens of Land Cover/Land Use Change (LCLUC) and the multi-scale and multi-thematic drivers of change. In addition to assessing the key processes that shape and re-shape island ecosystems and their land cover/land use changes, the book highlights measurement and assessment methods to characterize patterns and trajectories of change and models to examine the social-ecological drivers of change on islands. For instance, chapters report on the results of a meta-analysis to examine trends in published literature on islands, a satellite image time-series to track changes in urbanization, social surveys to support household analyses, field sampling to represent the state of resources and their limitations on islands, and dynamic systems models to link socio-economic data to LCLUC patterns. The authors report on a diversity of islands, conditions, and circumstances that affect LCLUC patterns and processes, often informed through perspectives rooted, for instance, in conservation, demography, ecology, economics, geography, policy, and sociology.

This text aims to promote a better understanding of land use and land-cover change in the assessment and management of global environmental resources, and to develop a comparative framework for assessing these changes.

This work analyzes the effects of one of the most dramatic changes of entire societies that the world has ever witnessed. It explores the collapse of socialist governance and management systems on land cover and land use in various parts of Eastern Europe. As readers will discover, this involved rapid and unprecedented changes such as widespread agricultural abandonment. Changes in the countries of the former Soviet block, former Soviet Union republics, and European Russia are compared and contrasted. Contributing authors cover topics such as the carbon cycle and the environment, effects of institutional changes on urban centers and agriculture, as well as changes in wildlife populations. The volume includes analysis of the drivers of agricultural land abandonment, forest changes in Black Sea region, an extreme drought event of 2010, impacts of fires on air quality and other land-cover/land-use issues in Eastern Europe. Satellite data used were mostly from optical sensors including night lights observations, with both coarse and medium spatial resolution. Ultimately, this work highlights the importance of understanding socioeconomic shocks: that is, those brief periods during which societies change rapidly resulting in significant impact on land use and the environment. Thus it shows that change is often abrupt rather than gradual and thereby much harder to predict. This book is a truly international and interdisciplinary effort, written by a team of scientists from the USA, Europe, and Russia. It will be of interest to a broad range of scientists at all levels within natural and social sciences, including those studying recent and ongoing changes in Europe. In particular, it will appeal to geographers, environmental scientists, remote sensing specialists, social scientists and agricultural scientists.

Filling the need for a comprehensive book that covers both theory and application, Remote Sensing of Land Use and Land Cover: Principles and Applications provides a synopsis of how remote sensing can be used for land-cover characterization, mapping, and monitoring from the local to the global scale. With contributions by leading scientists from aro

This volume is a synthesis of the NASA funded work under the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program. Hundreds of scientists have worked for the past eight years to understand one of the most important forces that is changing our planet-human impacts on land cover, that is land use. Its contributions span the natural and the social sciences, and apply state-of-the-art techniques for understanding the earth: satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems, modeling, and advanced computing. It brings together detailed case studies, regional analyses, and globally scaled mapping efforts. This is the most organized effort made to understand the dominant force that has been responsible for changing the Earth’s biosphere. Audience: This publication will be of interest to students, scientists, and policy makers. This volume includes a CD-ROM containing full color images of a selection of illustrations which are printed in black-and-white in the book.