Land change science

Aims

Thus far, the aims of land change science have been to:

1. Observe and monitor land changes underway throughout the world
2. Understand land change as a human-environmental system
3. Model land change
4. Assess system outcomes such as vulnerability, sustainability, and resilience

Related disciplines

Land change science is an interdisciplinary field, and thus is influenced by a number of related areas of study, including remote sensing, political ecology, resource economics, landscape ecology, and biogeography. It is meant to supplement the study of climate change, and through the examination of land cover and land use changes in conjunction with climatic changes over the same period of time, scientists can better understand how human land use practices contribute to a changing climate. Given its close association with the study of climate change, land change science is inherently sustainability research and the scientific knowledge it produces is used to influence the development of sustainable agriculture, and sustainable land use practices and policies.

Although land change science involves quantifying the location, extent, and variability of land change cover and the analysis of emergent patterns, it remains fundamentally interdisciplinary, including social and economic components.

Methods

Land change science mainly operates within the international scientific research frameworks from which its fundamental questions were developed. Although the field has ties to social and cultural studies in its understanding of land and land change as a human-environment system, land change science also focuses on ecosystems and earth systems' structure, function, and effects on land change, independent of human activity. Land change science encompasses a broad scope of dimensions, ranging from quantifying the ecological effects of land cover change, to understanding the socio-environmental drivers for land-use decisions at an institutional level. As a result, land change science relies on the synthesis of a wide range of data and a diverse range of data collection methods. These include for example land cover monitoring and assessments, modeling risk and vulnerability, and land change modeling.

Challenges

Land change science as a discipline faces several challenges, many of the stemming from its interdisciplinary qualities or issues with developing inferences using aggregate data. For example, land change science is limited by constraints on data and lack of understanding of underlying issues of land change. Specifically, the spatial models frequently used to study land change may restricted by lack of access to public data on land change, faulty sensors, and high levels of variable uncertainty. Thus, models are often only able to make short-term projections, which severely limits the level of prediction they can provide. Additionally, it is difficult to synthesize and combine the case studies of social-environmental systems that are essential to the study of land change on a global scale. Thus, these setbacks pose fundamental challenges to the connection of communities and environment that land change science seeks to achieve.