Projecting land use change impacts on nutrients, sediment and runoff in multiple spatial scales: Business-as-usual vs. stakeholder-informed scenarios

We present results from the OP3 campaign in Sabah during 2008 that allow us to study the impact of local emission changes over Borneo on atmospheric composition at the regional and wider scale. OP3 constituent data provide an important constraint on model performance. Treatment of boundary layer processes is highlighted as an important area of model uncertainty. Model studies of land-use change confirm earlier work, indicating that further changes to intensive oil palm agriculture in South East Asia, and the tropics in general, could have important impacts on air quality, with the biggest factor being the concomitant changes in NO x emissions. With the model scenarios used here, local increases in ozone of around 50 per cent could occur. We also report measurements of short-lived brominated compounds around Sabah suggesting that oceanic (and, especially, coastal) emission sources dominate locally. The concentration of bromine in short-lived halocarbons measured at the surface during OP3 amounted to about 7 ppt, setting an upper limit on the amount of these species that can reach the lower stratosphere.

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Change in agricultural land use constrains adaptation of national wildlife refuges to climate change

Environmental Conservation ◽

10.1017/s0376892914000174 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 12-19 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

CHRISTOPHER M. HAMILTON ◽

WAYNE E. THOGMARTIN ◽

VOLKER C. RADELOFF ◽

ANDREW J. PLANTINGA ◽

PATRICIA J. HEGLUND ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Use Change ◽

Forest Cover ◽

Agricultural Land ◽

Global Climate ◽

Urban Land Use ◽

Management Options ◽

Ecological Processes ◽

Species Invasions ◽

Business As Usual

SUMMARYLand-use change around protected areas limits their ability to conserve biodiversity by altering ecological processes such as natural hydrologic and disturbance regimes, facilitating species invasions, and interfering with dispersal of organisms. This paper informs USA National Wildlife Refuge System conservation planning by predicting future land-use change on lands within 25 km distance of 461 refuges in the USA using an econometric model. The model contained two differing policy scenarios, namely a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario and a ‘pro-agriculture’ scenario. Regardless of scenario, by 2051, forest cover and urban land use were predicted to increase around refuges, while the extent of range and pasture was predicted to decrease; cropland use decreased under the business-as-usual scenario, but increased under the pro-agriculture scenario. Increasing agricultural land value under the pro-agriculture scenario slowed an expected increase in forest around refuges, and doubled the rate of range and pasture loss. Intensity of land-use change on lands surrounding refuges differed by regions. Regional differences among scenarios revealed that an understanding of regional and local land-use dynamics and management options was an essential requirement to effectively manage these conserved lands. Such knowledge is particularly important given the predicted need to adapt to a changing global climate.

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