User:Weilh/Land Change Science

Land change science

Imaging by NASA of the effects of deforestation on rainfall in Brazil, an example of land change science modeling.

Land change science is the interdisciplinary study of the consequences of human-environment interactions on the climate, land use, and land cover. The purpose of land change science is to contribute to existing climate change science regarding the development of sustainable resource management. Land change science addresses land use as a human-environment system that can be used to understand environmental and social problems.

Overview

Human changes to land surfaces have been documented for centuries as having significant impact on earth systems and on human well-being. The reshaping of landscapes to serve human needs, such as the creation of farmland out of what was previously forest, can affect earth systems long-term and exacerbate or even directly cause climate change. Although today climate change mitigation efforts are largely focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, prior to the Industrial Revolution, deforestation and irrigation were the largest sources of human contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. Even today, 35% of human carbon dioxide contributions can be attributed to land use or land cover changes, which support over 7 billion people with food, water, shelter, and other benefits.

Currently, nearly 50% of Earth’s non-ice land surface has been transformed by human activities, with approximately 40% of land used for agriculture, which surpasses natural systems as the principal source of nitrogen emissions. Furthermore, local land change and land use can have a huge and compounded impact on regional climate systems, particularly when human activities heavily disrupt natural cycles. For example, massive irrigation projects have triggered the rapid decline of the Aral Sea, which in turn caused events such as the wind-caused spreading of salt from the dry seabed on adjacent agricultural lands.

Land change science is a recently developed field that is important to the evolution of climate change science and adaptation strategies. It is both problem-oriented and interdisciplinary. The purpose of land change science has so far been 1) to observe and monitor land changes underway throughout the world 2) to understand land change as a human-environmental system 3) to model land change 4) to assess system outcomes such as vulnerability, sustainability, and resilience.

Origin

Land change science emerged in conjunction with advancing climate change and global environmental change studies. In the mid-20^th century, human-environment relationships were emerging in areas of study such as anthropology and geography. Some scholars argue that the discipline of land change science is loosely derived from German concepts of landscape as the total amount of things within a given territory. In the latter half of the 20^th century, scientists studying cultural ecology and risk-assessment ecology worked to develop land change science as a means of addressing land as a human-environment system that can be understood as a foundation of global environmental science.

Influences

Land change science is an interdisciplinary field, and thus is influenced by a number of related areas of study, including remote sensing, political ecology, resource economics, landscape ecology, and biogeography. It is meant to supplement the study of climate change by helping scientists better understand how human land use practices contribute to a changing climate by examining land cover and land use change over time in conjunction with changes in climate over the same period of time. Given its close association with the study of climate change, land change science is also at its core sustainability research, and the scientific knowledge it produces is used to influence the development of sustainable agriculture and land use practices and policies.

Dimensions

Land change science predominantly operates within the international scientific research frameworks from which its fundamental questions were developed. . Although it has ties to social and cultural sciences in its understanding of land and land change as a human-environment system, land change science also focuses on the structure and function of earth systems and environmental systems and their effects on land change independent of humans. There are many different dimensions of land change science, ranging from quantifying the ecological effects of land cover change to understanding the socioenvironmental drivers for land-use decisions at an institutional level.As a result, land change science relies heavily on the synthesis of a wide range of data and a diverse range of data collection methods, some of which are detailed below.

Land Cover Monitoring and Assessments

A primary function of land change science is to document and model long-term patterns of landscape change, which may result from both human activity and natural processes. To complete this function, scientists can use a variety of tools including remotely-sensed data, observation, historical accounts, and reconstruction modeling. By better understanding patterns in changes in land cover, scientists can determine the consequences of these changes and predict the impact of future changes in land management.

Risk and Vulnerability

Studying risk and vulnerability in the context of land change science entails the development of quantitative, qualitative, and geospatial models, methods, and support tools. The purpose of these tools is to communicate the vulnerability of both human communities and natural ecosystems to hazard events or long-term land change. Modeling risk and vulnerability requires analyses of community sensitivity to hazards as well as an understanding of geographic distributions of people and infrastructure, coupled with an ability to calculate the likelihood of occurrence for specific disturbance factors.