Land use and land cover change, socioeconomic shocks, and effects on biodiversity

Volker Radeloff, University of Wisconsin-Madison, radeloff@wisc.edu (Presenter)

By using the land and changing its cover, humans arguable exert their strongest impacts on the Earth’s system. As forests are cut, grasslands are plowed, and cities sprawl, every aspect of the environment is changed, including carbon, nutrient, and water cycles, climate, habitat, and the ecosystem services upon which humans depend. That is what makes it important to understand how land cover changes, what drives these changes, and the ramifications. NASA satellite imagery, especially the unparalleled 40+ year record of Landsat data, has captured land cover change better than any other data source. Land cover change is widespread and rampant, and land use is generally intensifying. Land cover change is far from uniform though, and difficult to understand because it cannot be experimentally manipulated and is inherently complex. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union provided a unique natural experiment that affected many countries. What this experiment has demonstrated is that socioeconomic shocks can alter land cover change trends drastically, and in surprising ways. On one hand, approximately a quarter of Russia’s agricultural land was abandoned, forests are re-growing, and land use became less intensive. On the other hand, reverting forests to private ownership in the Baltic countries accelerated forest harvesting, and made land use much more intensive. Wildlife populations plummeted in the decade after the collapse, especially in former Soviet countries, but some species recovered since as habitat improved, and poaching declined. Socioeconomic shocks, wars, and revolutions represent ‘hot moments’ for land cover change. In such moments, trends and patterns can change rapidly and unexpectedly. Some of these changes are permanents pushing the land use system into a novel state. Others are temporary, and land use systems are reverting to prior states as time passes. For earth science, hot moments are a challenge, because they are inherently difficult to predict, but they also are an opportunity, because they can reveal the drivers of land cover change. For land management and conservation, hot moments represent both a threat, because there is a very real risk that changes will be for the worse, but also an opportunity, because these are the times when change are possible, and NASA satellite data allows us to have our fingers on the pulse when these changes occur.

Presentation: 2015_Apr22_AM_Radeloff_30.pptx (26273k)

Presentation Type:  Plenary Talk

Session:  Theme 4: Human influence on global ecosystems

Presentation Time:  Wed 9:48 AM  (18 minutes)