Historical land use change and associated carbon emissions in Brazil from 1940 to 1995

Abstract

[1] The evaluation of impacts of land use change is in general limited by the knowledge of past land use conditions. Most publications on the field present only a vague description of the earlier patterns of land use, which is usually insufficient for more comprehensive studies. Here we present the first spatially explicit reconstruction of historical land use patterns in Brazil, including both croplands and pasturelands, for the period between 1940 and 1995. This reconstruction was obtained by merging satellite imagery with census data, and provides a 5′ Â 5′ yearly data set of land use for three different categories (cropland, natural pastureland and planted pastureland) for Brazil. The results show that important land use changes occurred in Brazil. Natural pasture dominated in the 1950s and 1960s, but since the beginning of 1970s it has been gradually replaced by planted pasture, especially in southeast and center west of Brazil. The croplands began its expansion in the 1960s reaching extensive areas in almost all states in 1980. Carbon emissions from historical land use changes were calculated by superimposing a composite biomass map on grids of a weighted average of the fractions of the vegetation types and the replacement land uses. Net emissions from land use changes between 1940 and 1995 totaled 17.2 AE 9.0 Pg-C (90% confidence range), averaging 0.31 AE 0.16 Pg-C yr À1

Changes in soil carbon stocks in Brazil due to land use: paired site comparisons and a regional pasture soil survey

“…One of the most intense land use changes has taken place in Brazil over recent decades (Leite et al, 2012). This land use change has increased the agricultural area of Brazil to approximately 270 million hectares, being 200 million hectares of pasture and 70 million hectares of arable land (Martinelli et al, 2010).…”

An approach to spatially explicit reconstruction of historical forest in Northeast China

“…Later, these authors expanded the geographic scope to global and the entire period from 8000 years ago to AD 1850 using the same methods (Kaplan et al, 2011). By merging satellite imagery with census data, Leite et al (2012) reconstructed a 5′ spatial resolution yearly dataset of land use from 1940 to 1995 for three different categories (cropland, natural pastureland, and planted pastureland) for Brazil. These reconstructions have all paid more attention to cropland and pastureland, whereas there are hardly any reconstructions of historical forest cover, particularly for China.…”

Estimating the human appropriation of land in Brazil by means of an Input–Output Economic Model and Ecological Footprint analysis

“…Although land use and land-use change have been well studied in Brazil (e.g., Aldrich et al, 2006;de Sá et al, 2012;Gardner et al, 2013;Leite et al, 2012), a nation-wide evaluation of land-use types across the whole sectorial spectrum of the country's economy is still lacking. Most importantly, the amount of land utilized by each Brazilian economic sector per monetary unit of their final demand (i.e., land intensity) is not known.…”