Land Use - Ecosystem - Climate Interactions in Monsoon Asia: Projecting LCLUC Impacts on Carbon, Water, and Climate in the First Half of 21st Century

Hanqin Tian, Auburn University, tianhan@auburn.edu (Presenting)
Robert Dickinson, Georgia Institute of Technology, robted@eas.gatech.edu
Jerry Melillo, Marine Biological Laboratory, jmelillo@mbl.edu
John Reilly, MIT, jreilly@mit.edu
Hassan Virji, START, hvirji@agu.org

The Asian monsoon is an important climate feature that affects the water resources, the terrestrial ecosystem productivity, the regional carbon cycle and, therefore, the lives of more than half of world’s population: the people of South, Southeast and East Asia. This region has experienced one of the most rapid changes in the past decade and is likely to undergo further rapid development in the coming years. Land-cover/land use changes (LCLUC) in Monsoon Asia are being powered by demand for food for its growing population and by the transition from a largely rural society to one in which more than half of its people are expected to live in cities within two decades (United Nations 2002). There is a rapidly increasing concern that LCLUC caused by urbanization, deforestation, afforestation, desertification and biofuel production may affect local, regional and global climate and further influence the provision of goods and services by terrestrial ecosystems in the region of Monsoon Asia. Built on our previous NASA IDS funded projects, in this NASA LCLUC project, we intend to understand complex interactions among land use, ecosystem and climate and to evaluate the impacts of current and projected LCLUC on climate, water and carbon cycling in the region of monsoon Asia in the first half of 21st century by using an integrated model of regional climate, ecosystem, land use and economy. Multiple sensor remote sensing data, such as AVHRR, MODIS, and Landsat TM/ETM+, as well as global and regional remote sensing-derived products, model-derived data, field observations, and demographic-economic data, will be used to develop time-series LCLU data sets from 1700 to 2050. This project will contribute the goals of NASA LCLUC program in (1) developing the capability to perform repeated global inventories of LULC from space; (2) evaluating the consequences of observed and predicted changes; and (3) furthering the understanding of the consequences of LULC changes on the carbon and water cycles. This project will answer the key questions solicited in the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS), such as “what will the monsoon Asian region be like in 50 years?” “What will be the consequences of these projected changes for the welfare of the Asia region?” and “what will be the consequences of these changes for the Earth system?”