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125. Irwin EG, Bockstael NE (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:2067220677.
126. Daz S, Lavoral S, de Bello F, Quetier F, Grigulis K, Robson TM (2007) Proc Natl Acad
Sci USA 104:20684 20689.
127. Lawrence D, DOdorico P, Diekmann L, DeLonge M, Das R, Eaton J (2007) Proc Natl
Acad Sci USA 104:20696 20701.
128. Manson SM, Evans T (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:20678 20683.
129. Stafford Smith DM, McKeon GM, Watson IW, Henry BK, Stone GS, Hall WB, Howden
SM (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:20690 20695.
www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0800052105
CORRECTION
Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved September 5, 2007 (received for review May 17, 2007)
Land change science has emerged as a fundamental component of global environmental change and sustainability research. This in-
terdisciplinary field seeks to understand the dynamics of land cover and land use as a coupled human environment system to ad-
dress 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.
Land Change and Its Science sions, local to regional land changes re- system) as well as the human system be-
main important. For example, the large-
H
uman-driven changes in the yond the immediate land use.
terrestrial surface of the earth scale replacement of natural land cover by The daunting objectives of LCS (8, 25,
hold wide-ranging significance urban and agricultural land uses in south- 27) are treated in this introductory paper.
for the structure and function ern Florida has reduced precipitation For each of the four main components of
of ecosystems to the earth system, with there (19), consistent with land change LCS research, we briefly review the re-
equally far-reaching consequences for hu- regional climate impacts found elsewhere search progress underway, discuss some of
man well-being (1). The antiquity of the (20). Even more dramatically, massive the major implications for global environ-
unintended impacts of these changes is irrigated agricultural projects triggered the mental change and sustainability themes,
well documented for locales and regions collapse of the Aral Sea and its fishing and outline some of the major challenges
(2, 3), and those linked to megafauna industry, with feedbacks that include remaining. Finally, the six research papers
losses obtained a global reach by 10,000 wind-dispersed deposition of surface salts that compose this special feature are set
B.P. (46). from the dry sea bed on adjacent agricul- within the structure of the overall LCS
Deforestation and irrigation were the tural lands and even on the glacial sources effort.
largest sources of human-released green- of rivers feeding the sea (21).
house gasses to the atmosphere until the Changes in land and ecosystems and The Dimensions of LCS: Advances,
advent of industrial era fossil-fuel burning, their implications for global environ- Implications, and Challenges
and as much as 35% of the human-in- mental change and sustainability are a Observation, Monitoring, and Land Charac-
duced CO2 equivalents in the atmosphere major research challenge for the human- terization. The number of and improve-
today can be traced to the totality of land- environmental sciences (2224). This ments in air- and space-borne sensors
use/cover changes (7, 8). These land-based research is undertaken by various commu- over the past two decades have funda-
changes currently support over 6 billion nities, including remote sensing, political mentally altered the capacity to observe
people with food, fiber, water, and other ecology, resource economics, institution
benefits, and they support the highest governance, landscape ecology, biogeogra-
global average per capita consumption phy, and integrated assessment, among Author contributions: B.L.T., E.F.L., and A.R. wrote the
ever known. This unprecedented level of others. Its most comprehensive form, paper.
land production, however, has been however, joins the human, environmental, The authors declare no conflict of interest.
matched by unparalleled impacts on the and geographical informationremote To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
earth system, especially since the latter sensing sciences in an interdisciplinary bturner@clarku.edu.
part of the twentieth century. effort increasingly referred to as land Land transformation refers to radical changes in land
Today, as much as 50% of the earths change (or land system) science (LCS) use and cover, usually over the long term, such as forest to
row crop cultivation, or wetlands to urban settlement. The
ice-free land surface has been trans- (25, 26). This emergent research commu- various estimates of these changes differ owing to the use
formed (9, 10), and virtually all land has nity seeks to improve: (i) observation and of different metrics and measures and the uncertainties
been affected in some way by such pro- monitoring of land changes underway involved. Regardless, transformations are sizable as pro-
cesses as coadapted landscapes, climate throughout the world, (ii) understanding portion of the ice-free land surface. If lands altered by
human activitylands retaining their base land cover but
change, and tropospheric pollution (11 of these changes as a coupled human configured differently than in the wildland stateare
14). Much of this change is a direct con- environment system, (iii) spatially explicit included, a much larger estimate would result. Examples
sequence of land uses: 40% of land modeling of land change, and (iv) assess- include degraded arid lands, pasture and grasslands in-
ments of system outcomes, such as vulner- vaded by or planted to exotic flora, and coadapted forests
surface is in agriculture (including im-
and grassland. Coadapted land covers are shaped and
proved pasture and coadapted grassland), ability, resilience, or sustainability (Fig. 1) maintained by prolonged and repeated human activity,
which accounts for nearly 85% of annual (27). This agenda is made more complex such as burning, that enlarges land use or land production:
water withdrawals globally (8) and sur- by treating the environment in terms of its for example, annual burning that expands savanna grasses
relative to woody species and enlarges food stocks for
passes nature as the principal source of array of ecosystem (environmental) goods
livestock and native grazers.
nitrogen emissions (15, 16); 3.3 billion and services, rather than individual re- Aswith estimates of land transformations and alterations,
ruminants graze rangelands, producing sources (22, 28). Decisions to use land there is little doubt that human activity usurps a large
methane (17); and land uses take up 10 affect these goods and services, with con- proportion of terrestrial net primary productivity, but the
50% of terrestrial net primary productivity sequences for the structure and function uncertainty in the estimates remains large (16).
(18). In the face of these global dimen- of ecosystems (and ultimately, the earth 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
20666 20671 PNAS December 26, 2007 vol. 104 no. 52 www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0704119104
SPECIAL FEA TURE: PERSPECTIVE
given that the Landsat system, with its
spatiotemporal resolution (900 m2; every
16 days) and relatively low costs, has been
the workhorse database for so much of
LCS (47). Research has also moved to-
ward such land changes as cryptic de-
forestation (e.g., due to selective logging;
36), soil erosion, pest impacts on land
cover, and shifts in land management
practices. These subtle changes pose a
series of challenges because they require
the detection of trends in biophysical
attributes of the land surface within land-
cover categories, independent of interan-
nual variability in such attributes largely
climate driven. Finally, mechanisms by
which monitoring systems can integrate
information at multiple spatiotemporal
resolutions and from different instruments
must be improved.
Turner et al. PNAS December 26, 2007 vol. 104 no. 52 20667
markets (53), policy (54), transportation consequences for atmospheric greenhouse Modeling. Land change models are com-
(55), governance (56), and household life gasses, albedo, or the hydrologic cycle plex, owing to their coupling of human
cycles (57, 58) on different types of land (75, 76). and environmental dynamics and to their
covers (e.g., tropical deforestation). To Research on biophysical feedbacks on need to be spatially (geographically) ex-
date, other than climate change, biophysi- land uses and human well-being has been plicit (8892). The spatial configuration of
cal variables have received less attention constrained similarly to that on impacts land uses and covers affects and is af-
as causal factors (but see refs. 5961); (above). Examples include local-to- fected by the processes in question. The
rather they tend to be used as ambient regional scale changes in precipitation and prevalent use in LCS of data derived from
conditions in which human or social fac- temperature or watershed flooding ren- satellite imagery makes the scale of the
tors operate. The major exception involves dered by land-cover changes (19, 77), as pixel, which ranges in size from less than a
semiarid land degradation, often called well as the regional reach of urban heat meter to several kilometers, the finest
desertification. This process examined in island effects (78). Various pollutants grain of spatially specificity in the model
Sahel, for example, has demonstrated the from urban-industrial areas reduce crop (93, 94). These complexities notwithstand-
synergy between land management prac- yields, often at large spatial scales and ing, a range of econometric, ecological,
tices, whatever their origins, and pro- interacting with nitrous oxide released and agent-based models have been ex-
longed climatic drought in triggering land from fertilizer (12, 14, 15, 79). Serious plored to meet land management needs to
degradation (62). pressure on the environment has been better assess and project the future role of
For any locale (fine grain) composed of noted in pig-producing regions of Ger- land-use/cover change in the functioning
multiple land uses and covers, suites of many, The Netherlands, Denmark, and of the earth system, or simply to gain in-
factors tend to operate in chain-linked or Switzerland, where ammonia deposition sights into a land system from various
nested ways (27, 48, 63, 64), and their spe- exceeds the critical loads of nitrogen of perspectives (9597). Land-use change
cific configuration and interaction may sensitive ecosystems (80). Climate change, models allow testing of the stability of
lead to dissimilar outcomes. For example, itself partially linked to changes in the linked humanenvironment systems
the same international regulations and terrestrial surface of the earth, interacts through scenario building. These models
markets, operating through similar, cas- with land-cover change to threaten ecosys- tend either to apply advanced statistical
cading tiers of national institutions and tems worldwide (81, 82) as well as land modeling tools to spatially explicit data-
local conditions, potentially yield dissimi- uses, foremost agriculture (83). In addi- sets or to simulate humanenvironment
lar land-use/cover outcomes. Unpacking tion, ecosystem transformation modifies systems based on a set of idealized rules
this complexity and rebuilding it to move habitat suitability for vectors of diseases of behavior, although combinations of
beyond the variance of place remains a and for animal hosts of zoonotic diseases, these approaches also exist. Statistical
central challenge. If single-sector analyses and land-use change may increase human models rely on the assumption that land-
of land change provide incomplete under- exposure to these diseases, therefore af- use change processes are stationary,
standing but insights about general causes fecting human health (8, 84). whereas process-based models represent
(65), place-based analyses provide more These focused approaches (above) not- changes in processes through time related
complete understanding but are often withstanding, various lines of research and to a change in system properties. Such
void of linkages to the general. Much at- modeling are becoming more inclusive shifts in system behavior can take place
tention needs to be directed to the refor- and complex, attempting to incorporate once some threshold is passed or can be
mulation of the sector-based concepts by more dimensions of the coupled system. triggered by single events, whether they
place-based outcomes. For instance, research on the ignition, are biophysical (e.g., drought, hurricanes,
Biophysical impacts and feedbacks. The LCS propagation, and impacts of forest fires soil degradation) or socioeconomic (e.g.,
community seeks to emphasize the totality has linked the interactions among climate, technological innovation, war, economic
of ecosystem goods and services involved vegetation structure, and land use on local crisis) in kind.
in land change (22, 28); thus much atten- to regional scales to address impacts on Land-use change models have been
tion is given to the structure and function biodiversity and such ecosystem services designed either at the scale of human
of the biophysical subsystem. This ideal as carbon sequestration, soil fertility, and environment systems as a whole [e.g.,
has proven difficult to implement for a grazing and touristic value, and hence IMAGE (Integrated Model to Assess the
number of reasons, including the complex- land-use change (85). Additionally, model- Global Environment), CLUE (Conversion
ity and costs involved in addressing goods ing assessments of Europe have singled of Land Use Change and its Effects), and
and services holistically. It is more com- out the Mediterranean region as increas- SALU (SAhelian Land-Use)] or at the
mon for research to examine sets of goods ingly confronting water shortages with scale of agents that represent individual
and services or parts of ecosystems (66, climate change, owing to changes in snow- units of decision making, interacting
67). Examples include the impacts of land- cover dynamics, including the timing of among themselves and with their environ-
scape fragmentation on keystone species runoff, and higher water extractions for ment (92). In the latter vein, statistical
and the consequences for other biota and irrigation and tourism (86). modeling has given rise to a growing body
landscape functioning (52, 68, 69); the The challenges for research on biophys- of research linking people to pixels, such
spread of invasive species as a conse- ical consequences and feedbacks are nu- as household survey data to land-cover
quence of land use; land-change conse- merous and detailed in other fora (87). data derived by remote sensing at a fine
quences for water and food supply and They include the identification of causal spatial resolution (97, 98). Simulation
amenity values (7072); various conse- links between ecosystem processes and models at the level of agents are also
quences of increased area of forest edges, ecosystem services and their dependence gaining traction. Environmental change is
from the loss of biota to the opening of on biodiversity, and the identification of simulated as an emergent property of in-
corridors for disease vectors (73); and the tipping points beyond which the resil- teractions between agents (94, 96). Differ-
impacts of changing cropfallow practices ience of different environmental systems ences between the relevant spatial units
on tropical forest succession and nutrient is lost. These and other challenges, of for biophysical processes and decision
dynamics (74). This focus on specific course, require improvements in dealing making by actors is one of the method-
goods and services or subsystems domi- with complexity of the complete cou- ological difficulties confronting the cou-
nates research at most scales of analysis, pled land system (see Synthesis and pling of subsystems in these models (50).
such as that directed to global land-cover Assessment). Numerous challenges confront the
Turner et al. PNAS December 26, 2007 vol. 104 no. 52 20669
can be directed to questions anchored in In the second example, Lawrence and change in the coupled and coevolving,
the core of the social sciences. They dem- associates (127) examine the impacts of multiscalar land system of the outback
onstrate that low-density or sub-/exurban slash and burn cultivation on soil phos- of Australia, using the principles of the
housing in the state of Maryland, partially phorus (P) in the tropical dry forest of Drylands Development Paradigm (62) to
within the northeastern metropolitan cor- southern Yucatan. They demonstrate a understand these dynamics. They examine
marked decline in readily available soil P the vagaries of drought and livestock
ridor, has resulted in a substantial increase
with the increased number of cropfallow markets on land management, and the
in undeveloped land fragmentation rela- consequent impacts on the ecological and
tive to development infill as measured by cycles undertaken, such that by the third human subsystems, linked to learning at
edge or land fragmentation metrics. Vari- cycle available soil P is insufficient to sup- the property, state, and national scales.
ous factors associated with the expansion port mature forest. Successional forest, in Lessons drawn that link LCS to applica-
of exurbia and its increasing fragmenta- turn, captures less P from the atmosphere, tion include not planning based on
tion pattern are also explored. They find creating a positive feedback that degrades average conditions in either subsystem,
that fragmentation is significantly higher the ecosystem with implications for both and the need for knowledge systems be-
in areas with more open space and signifi- forests and farmers. The linkages to farm- yond the managers themselves.
cantly lower within proximity to Chesa- ers can be made because this research is
part of a larger land change study treating Concluding Comments
peake Bay, suggesting that the pull of Approaching two decades of concerted
natural landscape amenities is an impor- the coupled humanenvironment system.
A virtual explosion in land modeling international and interdisciplinary efforts
tant determinant of these patterns. to address land-use/cover change as a cou-
Biophysical impacts and feedbacks are is illustrated by the work of Manson and
Evans (128). They integrate agent-based pled system, LCS appears to have moved
addressed in two case studies. In the first, beyond an adolescence phase but has not
models with other methods to examine yet fully matured. It has proven difficult
Daz, Lavorel, and colleagues (126) pro-
household decision making in south- to achieve a theory of coupled land sys-
vide a framework that permits assess-
central Indiana and the southern Yuca- tems. Complex systems concepts point to
ments of the indirect effects of functional
tan. The Indiana case links data from attributes of this coupling that are concep-
diversity on ecosystem properties and ser-
multiple sources, including interviews tually appealing but difficult to translate
vices, and they illustrate it through a case and laboratory-based experiments, to ex- into useful land-change outcomes (130).
study of grassland systems in the French amine the role of uncertainty, preferences, Subsystem concepts and associated theory,
Alps. These indirect effects have, hereto- demographics, and changing experience. in contrast, have proven useful in under-
fore, generated considerable uncertainty The Yucatan case uses evolutionary pro- standing specific outcomes and interac-
in understanding land-change impacts on gramming to represent bounded rational- tions of parts of the coupled system (27),
ecosystem services. Application of the ity in agriculturalist households to identify providing substantial insights for decision
framework indicates that community-level simple rules of thumb and broader social making. The achievements made across
averages often explain much about ecosys- and environmental factors in decision the various dimensions of LCS, only a few
tem properties, and it helps elucidate the of which could be illustrated in the six
making. This integrated modeling sup-
role of other factors and the conditions in case studies that follow, suggest an in-
ports the concept of land managers as creasingly rewarding and significant re-
which uncertainty cannot be reduced. Im- boundedly rational actors in both deforest- search future.
portantly, this study reveals that the rela- ing (Yucatan) and reforesting (Indiana)
tionships among abiotic factors, different systems. The models also demonstrate the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank the authors
components of functional diversity, and heterogeneity of land management strate- and reviewers in this special feature for their
ecosystem services can be addressed sys- timely comments. We appreciate the insights
gies used by local actors and highlight the gained from our participation in the Land Use
tematically. The procedure thus allows a utility of models to provide insight into and Cover Change Project and Global Land
formal incorporation of biodiversity as a complex land change systems. Project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere
Programme and the International Human Dimen-
driving factor in the sensitivity of ecosys- Finally, McKeon and associates (129) sions Programme on Global Environment
tem services to environmental change. provide a synthetic assessment of land Change.
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