The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability

Abstract

Land change science has emerged as a fundamental component of global environmental change and sustainability research. This interdisciplinary field seeks to understand the dynamics of land cover and land use as a coupled human-environment system to address theory, concepts, models, and applications relevant to environmental and societal problems, including the intersection of the two. The major components and advances in land change are addressed: observation and monitoring; understanding the coupled system-causes, impacts, and consequences; modeling; and synthesis issues. The six articles of the special feature are introduced and situated within these components of study.

Human activity intensity of land surface: Concept, methods and application in China

“…Economic and social factors were considered in the study of causes, mechanism, driving forces, and model building (Liu and Deng, 2009;Pelorosso et al, 2009;Tang et al, 2009). Recently, land change science has emerged as a fundamental component of global environmental change and sustainability research (Turner et al, 2007). As much as half of the earth's ice-free land surface has been transformed by human activities (Haberl et al, 2007;Vitousek et al, 1997).…”

A new approach for land cover classification and change analysis: Integrating backdating and an object-based method

“…Land use/land cover (LULC) change affects local and regional climate, carbon, water, and biodiversity, and therefore has been recognized as one of the major components of environmental change (Grimm et al, 2008;Turner, Lambin, & Reenberg, 2007). Accurate information on LULC and change is crucial for ecosystem monitoring, environmental change studies, and land management and planning (Turner et al, 2007).…”

“…Accurate information on LULC and change is crucial for ecosystem monitoring, environmental change studies, and land management and planning (Turner et al, 2007). Remote sensing data have been widely used for LULC classification and change analysis, as these data explicitly reveal spatial patterns of LULC and change over a large geographic area in a recurrent and consistent way (De Fries, Hansen, & Townshend, 1998;Homer et al, 2007;Peng, Liu, Shen, Han, & Pan, 2012;Vogelmann, Howard, & Yang, 2001;Zhang et al, 2014).…”

Emergent Global Land Governance

“…These concerns are also evident in the manner in which agriculture is an u e here not of telecoupled systems dvances and is translated to policy actors, and with repeated interaction among actors engaged in rticulating these concerns in global policy spaces becomes more frequent. seriously in climate change science even though it has long been well known that agricultural production is the single largest use for land (Turner et al 2007). A recent study by the Washingt based International Food Policy Research Institute (Nelson et al 2010) calculates that agricultural emissions account for almost one-third of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, a number significantly greater than estimates just a few short years ago and which is more than the energy and transport sectors combined.…”