Impacts of future climate and land cover changes on landslide susceptibility: regional scale modelling in the Val d’Aran region (Pyrenees, Spain)

Abstract. Land use and land cover change can increase or decrease landslide susceptibility (LS) in the mountainous areas. In the hilly and mountainous part of southwestern China, land use and land cover change (LUCC) has taken place in the last decades due to infrastructure development and rapid economic activities. This development and activities can worsen the slope susceptible to sliding due to mostly the cutting of slopes. This study, taking Zhushan Town, Xuan'en County, as the study area, aims to evaluate the influence of land use and land cover change on landslide susceptibility at a regional scale. Spatial distribution of landslides was determined in terms of visual interpretation of aerial photographs and remote sensing images, supported by field surveys. Two types of land use and land cover (LUC) maps, with a time interval covering 21 years (1992–2013), were prepared: the first was obtained by the neural net classification of images acquired in 1992 and the second by the object-oriented classification of images in 2002 and 2013. Landslide-susceptible areas were analyzed using the logistic regression model (LRM) in which six influencing factors were chosen as the landslide susceptibility indices. In addition, the hydrologic analysis method was applied to optimize the partitioning of the terrain. The results indicated that the LUCC in the region was mainly the transformation from the grassland and arable land to the forest land, which is increased by 34.3 %. An increase of 1.9 % is shown in the area where human engineering activities concentrate. The comparison of landslide susceptibility maps among different periods revealed that human engineering activities were the most important factor in increasing LS in this region. Such results emphasize the requirement of a reasonable land use planning activity process.

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Potential implications of future climate and land-cover changes for the fate and distribution of persistent organic pollutants in Europe

Global Ecology and Biogeography ◽

10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00547.x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 64-74 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Alexander G. Paul ◽

Volker C. Hammen ◽

Thomas Hickler ◽

Ulrich G. Karlson ◽

Kevin C. Jones ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Cover ◽

Organic Pollutants ◽

Persistent Organic Pollutants ◽

Future Climate ◽

Land Cover Changes

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A space view of agricultural and industrial changes during the Syrian civil war

Elem Sci Anth ◽

10.1525/elementa.2021.000041 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Rimal Abeed ◽

Cathy Clerbaux ◽

Lieven Clarisse ◽

Martin Van Damme ◽

Pierre-François Coheur ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Civil War ◽

Land Cover ◽

Regional Scale ◽

Atmospheric Composition ◽

Burned Area ◽

Land Cover Changes ◽

Islamic State ◽

Land Use Land Cover ◽

North East

The agricultural sector in Syria was heavily affected by the civil war that started in 2011. We investigate the war’s impact on the country’s atmospheric ammonia (NH3) from 2008 to 2019, using measurements from the infrared atmospheric sounding interferometer instrument on board the Metop satellites. We examine the changes in NH3 close to a fertilizer industry, whose activities were suspended due to conflict-related events. We also explore the effect of war-induced land use/land cover changes on agriculture-emitted ammonia in north-east Syria that has witnessed battles between different groups. The interpretation of the changes in NH3 is supported by different datasets: visible satellite imagery to assess the effect on industrial activity, reanalysis data from the European center for medium-range weather forecasts to look at the effect of meteorology (temperature, wind speed, and precipitation), and land cover and burned area products from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) to examine land use/land cover changes and fire events during the study period. We show that the NH3 columns are directly affected by the war. Periods of intense conflict are reflected in lower values over the industry reaching –17%, –47%, and –32% in 2013, 2014, and 2016, respectively, compared to the [2008–2012] average, and a decrease reaching –14% and –15% in the croplands’ area in northeast Syria during 2017 and 2018 (compared to 2011), respectively. Toward the end of the control of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, an increase in atmospheric NH3 was accompanied by an increase in croplands’ area that reached up to +35% in 2019 as compared to prewar (2011). This study shows the relevance of remote-sensing data of atmospheric composition in studying societal changes at a local and regional scale.

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Extended Dependence of the Hydrological Regime on the Land Cover Change in the Three-North Region of China: An Evaluation under Future Climate Conditions

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs11010081 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 81 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Yi Yao ◽

Xianhong Xie ◽

Shanshan Meng ◽

Bowen Zhu ◽

Kang Zhang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Land Cover ◽

Ecological Restoration ◽

Regional Scale ◽

Hydrological Regime ◽

Future Climate ◽

Climate Conditions ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

Hydrological Effects

The hydrological regime in arid and semi-arid regions is quite sensitive to climate and land cover changes (LCC). The Three-North region (TNR) in China experiences diverse climate conditions, from arid to humid zones. In this region, substantial LCC has occurred over the past decades due to ecological restoration programs and urban expansion. At a regional scale, the hydrological effects of LCC have been demonstrated to be less observable than the effects of climate change, but it is unclear whether or not the effects of LCC may be intensified by future climate conditions. In this study, we employed remote sensing datasets and a macro-scale hydrological modeling to identify the dependence of the future hydrological regime of the TNR on past LCC. The hydrological effects over the period from 2020–2099 were evaluated based on a Representative Concentration Pathway climate scenario. The results indicated that the forest area increased in the northwest (11,691 km2) and the north (69 km2) of China but declined in the northeast (30,042 km2) over the past three decades. Moreover, the urban area has expanded by 1.3% in the TNR. Under the future climate condition, the hydrological regime will be influenced significantly by LCC. Those changes from 1986 to 2015 may alter the future hydrological cycle mainly by promoting runoff (3.24 mm/year) and decreasing evapotranspiration (3.23 mm/year) over the whole region. The spatial distribution of the effects may be extremely uneven: the effects in humid areas would be stronger than those in other areas. Besides, with rising temperatures and precipitation from 2020 to 2099, the LCC may heighten the risk of dryland expansion and flooding more than climate change alone. Despite uncertainties in the datasets and methods, the regional-scale hydrological model provides new insights into the extended impacts of ecological restoration and urbanization on the hydrological regime of the TNR.

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Intercomparison of Burned Area Products and Its Implication for Carbon Emission Estimations in the Amazon

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs12233864 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (23) ◽

pp. 3864

Author(s):

Ana Carolina M. Pessôa ◽

Liana O. Anderson ◽

Nathália S. Carvalho ◽

Wesley A. Campanharo ◽

Celso H. L. Silva Junior ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Cover ◽

Forest Fires ◽

Carbon Emission ◽

Regional Scale ◽

National Level ◽

Burned Area ◽

Land Cover Changes ◽

Burned Areas ◽

Great Divergence ◽

Global Emissions

Carbon (C) emissions from forest fires in the Amazon during extreme droughts may correspond to more than half of the global emissions resulting from land cover changes. Despite their relevant contribution, forest fire-related C emissions are not directly accounted for within national-level inventories or carbon budgets. A fundamental condition for quantifying these emissions is to have a reliable estimation of the extent and location of land cover types affected by fires. Here, we evaluated the relative performance of four burned area products (TREES, MCD64A1 c6, GABAM, and Fire_cci v5.0), contrasting their estimates of total burned area, and their influence on the fire-related C emissions in the Amazon biome for the year 2015. In addition, we distinguished the burned areas occurring in forests from non-forest areas. The four products presented great divergence in the total burned area and, consequently, total related C emissions. Globally, the TREES product detected the largest amount of burned area (35,559 km2), and consequently it presented the largest estimate of committed carbon emission (45 Tg), followed by MCD64A1, with only 3% less burned area detected, GABAM (28,193 km2) and Fire_cci (14,924 km2). The use of Fire_cci may result in an underestimation of 29.54 ± 3.36 Tg of C emissions in relation to the TREES product. The same pattern was found for non-forest areas. Considering only forest burned areas, GABAM was the product that detected the largest area (8994 km2), followed by TREES (7985 km2), MCD64A1 (7181 km2) and Fire_cci (1745 km2). Regionally, Fire_cci detected 98% less burned area in Acre state in southwest Amazonia than TREES, and approximately 160 times less burned area in forests than GABAM. Thus, we show that global products used interchangeably on a regional scale could significantly underestimate the impacts caused by fire and, consequently, their related carbon emissions.

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Assessment of soil organic carbon stocks under future climate and land cover changes in Europe

The Science of The Total Environment ◽

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.03.085 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 557-558 ◽

pp. 838-850 ◽

Cited By ~ 73

Author(s):

Yusuf Yigini ◽

Panos Panagos

Keyword(s):

Organic Carbon ◽

Soil Organic Carbon ◽

Land Cover ◽

Carbon Stocks ◽

Future Climate ◽

Land Cover Changes ◽

Soil Organic Carbon Stocks

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Impacts of future land cover and climate changes on landslide susceptibility. Results obtained from regional-scale modelling in the Pyrenees.

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9327 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Marcel Hürlimann ◽

Vicente Medina ◽

Zizheng Guo ◽

Carol Puig-Polo ◽

Antonio Lloret ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Cover ◽

Landslide Susceptibility ◽

Climate Changes ◽

Rainfall Intensity ◽

Regional Scale ◽

Stability Conditions ◽

Lulc Changes ◽

Mountainous Regions ◽

Overall Stability ◽

Physically Based

Future environmental changes will strongly affect the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides in mountainous regions. In our ongoing study, we focus on the effects of climate changes as well as land use and land cover (LULC) changes on shallow slope failures in the Pyrenees. For this reason, a physically-based susceptibility model was developed, which calculates the landslide susceptibility at regional scale. The model merges two different approaches for the calculation of pore fluid pressure and also includes the option of defining the values of input parameters stochastically.The model was validated using landslide inventories from two different study areas located in the Central and Eastern Pyrenees. One is the inventory of historic shallow slides and debris flows in Andorra country. The other one is the inventory of the catastrophic landslide episode in Val d&#8217;Aran area in June 2013, which includes 393 landslide initiation points. The susceptibility modelling of these two validation cases produced acceptable results and showed that our physically-based model is producing consistent stability conditions.In the next step, the future LULC and climate changes until the end of the 21th century were simulated for Val d&#8217;Aran study area. The LULC changes were determined with the IDRISI TerrSet software suite, while the climate changes were obtained from the ensemble of regional climate models using RCP 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios. The results of the susceptibility modelling showed that the impacts of future LULC changes increase the overall stability because of the larger area of forest and shrubs (and consequently higher cohesion due to root strength). In contrast, the impact of future climate changes, which was principally incorporated by higher rainfall intensity, reduced the overall slope stability. However, when we compared the impacts of both future changes, the results showed that the influence of the vegetation expansion is more important than the effect of higher rainfall intensity. Therefore, the overall stability conditions in the study area seem to slightly improve in the future.As always in such studies, there are many uncertainties in the input data and additional simulations are necessary to confirm the observed trends. Nonetheless, the outcomes provide helpful information for researchers and practitioners that deal with the impacts of future changes on landslide susceptibility in mountainous regions.

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Conservation of woody species in China under future climate and land‐cover changes

Journal of Applied Ecology ◽

10.1111/1365-2664.14037 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Shijia Peng ◽

Jian Zhang ◽

Xiaoling Zhang ◽

Yaoqi Li ◽

Yunpeng Liu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Cover ◽

Woody Species ◽

Future Climate ◽

Land Cover Changes

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