scholarly journals An environmental assessment of land cover and land use change in Central Siberia using quantified conceptual overlaps to reconcile inconsistent data sets

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 251-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Wadsworth ◽  
H. Balzter ◽  
F. Gerard ◽  
C. George ◽  
A. Comber ◽  
...  
Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 443
Author(s):  
Evidence Chinedu Enoguanbhor ◽  
Florian Gollnow ◽  
Blake Byron Walker ◽  
Jonas Ostergaard Nielsen ◽  
Tobia Lakes

Land use planning as strategic instruments to guide urban dynamics faces particular challenges in the Global South, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where urgent interventions are required to improve urban and environmental sustainability. This study investigated and identified key challenges of land use planning and its environmental assessments to improve the urban and environmental sustainability of city-regions. In doing so, we combined expert interviews and questionnaires with spatial analyses of urban and regional land use plans, as well as current and future urban land cover maps derived from Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing. By overlaying and contrasting land use plans and land cover maps, we investigated spatial inconsistencies between urban and regional plans and the associated urban land dynamics and used expert surveys to identify the causes of such inconsistencies. We furthermore identified and interrogated key challenges facing land use planning, including its environmental assessment procedures, and explored means for overcoming these barriers to rapid, yet environmentally sound urban growth. The results illuminated multiple inconsistencies (e.g., spatial conflicts) between urban and regional plans, most prominently stemming from conflicts in administrative boundaries and a lack of interdepartmental coordination. Key findings identified a lack of Strategic Environmental Assessment and inadequate implementation of land use plans caused by e.g., insufficient funding, lack of political will, political interference, corruption as challenges facing land use planning strategies for urban and environmental sustainability. The baseline information provided in this study is crucial to improve strategic planning and urban/environmental sustainability of city-regions in Sub-Saharan Africa and across the Global South, where land use planning faces similar challenges to address haphazard urban expansion patterns.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 15469-15495 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Wu ◽  
L. J. Mickley ◽  
J. O. Kaplan ◽  
D. J. Jacob

Abstract. The effects of future land use and land cover change on the chemical composition of the atmosphere and air quality are largely unknown. To investigate the potential effects associated with future changes in vegetation driven by atmospheric CO2 concentrations, climate, and anthropogenic land use over the 21st century, we performed a series of model experiments combining a general circulation model with a dynamic global vegetation model and an atmospheric chemical-transport model. Our results indicate that climate- and CO2-induced changes in vegetation composition and density could lead to decreases in summer afternoon surface ozone of up to 10 ppb over large areas of the northern mid-latitudes. This is largely driven by the substantial increases in ozone dry deposition associated with changes in the composition of temperate and boreal forests where conifer forests are replaced by those dominated by broadleaf tree types, as well as a CO2-driven increase in vegetation density. Climate-driven vegetation changes over the period 2000–2100 lead to general increases in isoprene emissions, globally by 15 % in 2050 and 36 % in 2100. These increases in isoprene emissions result in decreases in surface ozone concentrations where the NOx levels are low, such as in remote tropical rainforests. However, over polluted regions, such as the northeastern United States, ozone concentrations are calculated to increase with higher isoprene emissions in the future. Increases in biogenic emissions also lead to higher concentrations of secondary organic aerosols, which increase globally by 10 % in 2050 and 20 % in 2100. Surface concentrations of secondary organic aerosols are calculated to increase by up to 1 μg m−3 for large areas in Eurasia. When we use a scenario of future anthropogenic land use change, we find less increase in global isoprene emissions due to replacement of higher-emitting forests by lower-emitting cropland. The global atmospheric burden of secondary organic aerosols changes little by 2100 when we account for future land use change, but both secondary organic aerosols and ozone show large regional changes at the surface.


2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrick Ao Otieno ◽  
Olumuyiwa I Ojo ◽  
George M. Ochieng

Abstract Land cover change (LCC) is important to assess the land use/land cover changes with respect to the development activities like irrigation. The region selected for the study is Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme (VHS) occupying an area of approximately 36, 325 hectares of irrigated land. The study was carried out using Land sat data of 1991, 2001, 2005 covering the area to assess the changes in land use/land cover for which supervised classification technique has been applied. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) index was also done to assess vegetative change conditions during the period of investigation. By using the remote sensing images and with the support of GIS the spatial pattern of land use change of Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme for 15 years was extracted and interpreted for the changes of scheme. Results showed that the spatial difference of land use change was obvious. The analysis reveals that 37.86% of additional land area has been brought under fallow land and thus less irrigation area (18.21%). There is an urgent need for management program to control the loss of irrigation land and therefore reclaim the damaged land in order to make the scheme more viable.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hoffmann ◽  
Diana Rechid ◽  
Vanessa Reinhart ◽  
Christina Asmus ◽  
Edouard L. Davin ◽  
...  

<p>Land-use and land cover (LULC) are continuously changing due to environmental changes and anthropogenic activities. Many observational and modeling studies show that LULC changes are important drivers altering land surface feedbacks and land-atmosphere exchange processes that have substantial impact on climate on the regional and local scale. Yet, most long-term regional climate modeling studies do not account for these changes. Therefore, within the WCRP CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study LUCAS (Land Use Change Across Scales) a new workflow was developed to generate high-resolution annual land cover change time series based on past reconstructions and future projections. First, the high-resolution global land cover dataset ESA-CCI LC (~300 m resolution) is aggregated and converted to a 0.1° resolution, fractional plant functional type (PFT) dataset. Second, the land use change information from the land-use harmonized dataset (LUH2), provided at 0.25° resolution as input for CMIP6 experiments, is translated into PFT changes employing a newly developed land use translator (LUT). The new LUT was first applied to the EURO-CORDEX domain. The resulting LULC maps for past and future - the LUCAS LUC dataset - can be applied as land use forcing to the next generation RCM simulations for downscaling CMIP6 by the EURO-CORDEX community and in the framework of FPS LUCAS. The dataset includes land cover and land management practices changes important for the regional and local scale such as urbanization and irrigation. The LUCAS LUC workflow is applied to further CORDEX domains, such as Australasia and North America. The resulting past and future land cover changes will be presented, and challenges regarding the application of the new workflow to different regions will be addressed. In addition, issues related to the implementation of the dataset into different RCMs will be discussed.</p>


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