Manifestations and underlying drivers of agricultural land use change in Europe

Vliet, Jasper van; Groot, H.L.F. de; Rietveld, Piet; Verburg, Peter H.

doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.09.001

Cited by 477 publications

(326 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…2015, Qviström and Vicenzotti 2016, paralleled by a continuous increase in the use of the term landscape in studies related to, for example, land use, environmental change, agriculture, and land management. The underlying drivers or causes of landscape changes have been investigated by many different approaches, which has resulted in a diversity of terminologies (Meyfroidt 2015, Van Vliet et al 2015a, 2015b, Eiter and Potthoff 2016, Plieninger et al 2016). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From concepts to practice: combining different approaches to understand drivers of landscape change

Kizos¹,

Verburg²,

Bürgi³

et al. 2018

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Landscape change and its drivers have been the focus of a growing body of literature in the past years. Our objective is to present different approaches to studying and understanding landscape change. We sketch the way in which different approaches and existing conceptual models are related to spatial scales and epistemological aims, and discuss complementarity and a range of applications with five specific research approaches from a Mediterranean landscape, including approaches at national and European levels. These include an analysis of historical landscape change, an investigation of decision-making processes, public awareness raising, evaluation of landscape services, and provision of policy support with data from published and unpublished material. The findings indicate that on the issue of complementarity, some models work better together with others. A major difference observed is the role that conceptual models and related approaches provide to the "voice" of stakeholders and actors of landscape change, sometimes contradicting, but often complementary. An important issue that comes up is a need for a plurality of research approaches and underlying conceptualizations of human-environment interactions, as the approaches represent different lenses for looking at the humanenvironmental system that are all abstractions from the full complexity of how decision-making on land use is conducted.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From concepts to practice: combining different approaches to understand drivers of landscape change

Kizos¹,

Verburg²,

Bürgi³

et al. 2018

E&S

Self Cite

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“…This poses the global challenge of increasing food security without exacerbating serious environmental problems, such as loss of biodiversity [5], greenhouse gas emissions [6], soil degradation [7], and alteration of hydrological cycles [8], among many others. While these issues are of global relevance, we recognize that they are local in nature since their effects are felt locally, while the actions on the land are performed by local actors whose decisions are driven not only by global [9,10], but also by regional [11] and local [12] forces.…”

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confidence: 99%

Interactions between Food Security and Land Use in the Context of Global Change

McConnell

Viña

2018

Land

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Increases in human population and per-capita consumption are putting enormous pressure on land resources. About 38% of the Earth's land area is being used in agricultural production [1], with about half (ca. 31%) of the remaining land being under forest cover [2] and the other half being less suitable for agricultural production due to edaphic, topographic and/or climatic factors. Despite the fact that over the last three decades the world food production has doubled [3], about 1 in 9 people in the world is still undernourished [4]. This poses the global challenge of increasing food security without exacerbating serious environmental problems, such as loss of biodiversity [5], greenhouse gas emissions [6], soil degradation [7], and alteration of hydrological cycles [8], among many others. While these issues are of global relevance, we recognize that they are local in nature since their effects are felt locally, while the actions on the land are performed by local actors whose decisions are driven not only by global [9,10], but also by regional [11] and local [12] forces.Given the great heterogeneity of sociocultural, economic and ecological conditions, it is quite challenging to develop sound theoretical propositions, to identify appropriate empirical approaches for testing them, and to synthesize across the myriad actions on the land, the factors influencing them, and their individual and aggregate consequences. The maturing science of land change [13,14] has emerged to provide such a foundation, and the undertaking is central to the mandate of the Global Land Programme (GLP), which continues a long tradition of producing generalized knowledge on land change [15]. The papers presented in this Special Issue arose from a symposium organized at the GLP's 3rd Open Science Meeting in Beijing, reporting mainly on projects supported by the Belmont Forum call on Food Security and Land Use Change, and organized by the GLP North American Nodal Office. Normally, as editors, we would seek to provide some level of synthesis from the findings presented herein, as a contribution to the effort to generate generalized knowledge. However, we find ourselves hampered in this endeavor by two issues that are emblematic of the land change field as a whole.First, while the Special Issue consists of a very small sample of the rapidly growing literature on land change, the contributions nevertheless address a wide array of land systems and focal processes, including agricultural intensification through the lens of telecoupling [16], the socioeconomic impacts of increasing production of a single crop commodity [17], spatial co-occurrence of food insecurity and biodiversity [18], increasing food security through the use of conservation agriculture [19], assessing whether food production can meet future needs [20,21], and developing strategies for modeling land use, food production and trade [22]. Furthermore, the studies address these issues across several continents (i.e., South America, Europe and Asia) and concern varying agricultural...

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“…The farmer is a major factor in agricultural land use change (Van Vliet et al 2015), his decisions are partly driven by economic interests but are also rooted in culture and tradition and the farmer accordingly decides for 'appropriate' management (Arts et al 2013;Ingram, Gaskell et al 2013). In response to forest policies and economic conditions the forest manager will decide on tree selection, crop rotation length, as well as mono-or multifunctional use of forests (Forest Europe 2015 2012).…”

Section: Drivers and Processes Of Landscape Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Van Vliet et al (2015) in a review of 137 case studies analysed the underlying drivers of agricultural land use change, and highlighted the role of farmers' decisions in land use change. Major landscape change trajectories were related to globalisation of agricultural markets, the transition from rural to urban society, and the shift to post socialism in Eastern Europe (Van Vliet et al 2015). This meta study however does not identify in greater depth the role of actors, or restricts this mostly to the land user (Van Vliet et al 2015).…”

Section: Tools For Landscape Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The character of Europe's countryside is rapidly changing (Primdahl 2014;Rounsevell et al 2012;Van Vliet et al 2015), as a result of urbanisation, changing demographic patterns, climate change, changing societal demands and new economic functions (EEA 2015). This is reflected in landscape changes, the most prominent of which are an increase in artificial surfaces and forested areas and a decrease in arable land and pastures.…”

Section: Chapter 4 4 4 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Europe: the paradox of landscape change : A case-study based contribution to the understanding of landscape transitions

Sluis

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Manifestations and underlying drivers of agricultural land use change in Europe

Cited by 477 publications

References 107 publications

From concepts to practice: combining different approaches to understand drivers of landscape change

From concepts to practice: combining different approaches to understand drivers of landscape change

Interactions between Food Security and Land Use in the Context of Global Change

Europe: the paradox of landscape change : A case-study based contribution to the understanding of landscape transitions

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