scholarly journals Global-scale comparisons of human land use: developing shared terminology for land-use practices for global change

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen D Morrison ◽  
◽  
E Hammer ◽  
L Popova ◽  
M Madella ◽  
...  
2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 5717-5731 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mueller ◽  
Gunnar Dressler ◽  
Compton Tucker ◽  
Jorge Pinzon ◽  
Peter Leimgruber ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inês S. Martins ◽  
Maria Dornelas ◽  
Mark Vellend ◽  
Chris D. Thomas

AbstractLand-use change is widely regarded as a simplifying and homogenising force in nature. In contrast, analysing global land-use reconstructions from the 10th to 20th centuries, we found progressive increases in the number, evenness, and diversity of ecosystems (including human-modified land-use types) across the globe. Ecosystem diversity increased more rapidly after ∼1700CE, then slowed or partially reversed (depending on the metric) following the mid-20th century acceleration of human impacts. Differentiation also generally increased across space, with homogenization only evident in the presence-absence analysis of ecosystem types at the global scale. Our results suggest that human land-use changes have primarily driven increases in ecosystem diversity over the last millennium.


Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin

Emancipation proved to be a far-reaching ecological event. Whereas the ecological regime of slavery had reinforced extensive land-use practices, the end of slavery weakened them. Freedpeople dedicated less time to erosion control and ditching and used contract negotiations and sharecropping arrangements to avoid working in a centrally directed gang. Understandably, freedpeople preferred to direct their own labor on an individual plot of land. The eventual proliferation of share-based or tenant contracts encouraged the physical reorganization of plantations. The combination of these two progressive alterations to labor relations tragically undermined African Americans’ efforts to achieve economic independence by tightening natural limits on cotton production and reducing blacks’ access to the South’s internal provisioning economy. The cessation, or even reduced frequency, of land maintenance on farms exacerbated erosion, flooding, and crops’ susceptibility to drought.


Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin

This chapter explores the ecological regime of slavery and the land-use practices employed by farmers across the antebellum South. Despite the diverse ecologies and crop regimes of the region, most southern farmers employed a set of extensive agricultural techniques that kept the cost of farming down and helped circumvent natural limits on crop production and stock-raising. The use of shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, and slaves to perform erosion control masked the environmental impacts of farmers’ actions, at least temporarily. Debates over westward expansion during the sectional crisis of the 1850s were not just about the extension of slavery, they also reflected practical concerns regarding access to new lands and fresh soil. Both were necessary for the continued profitability of farming in the South.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Sahar Shahpari ◽  
Janelle Allison ◽  
Matthew Tom Harrison ◽  
Roger Stanley

Agricultural land-use change is a dynamic process that varies as a function of social, economic and environmental factors spanning from the local to the global scale. The cumulative regional impacts of these factors on land use adoption decisions by farmers are neither well accounted for nor reflected in agricultural land use planning. We present an innovative spatially explicit agent-based modelling approach (Crop GIS-ABM) that accounts for factors involved in farmer decision making on new irrigation adoption to enable land-use predictions and exploration. The model was designed using a participatory approach, capturing stakeholder insights in a conceptual model of farmer decisions. We demonstrate a case study of the factors influencing the uptake of new irrigation infrastructure and land use in Tasmania, Australia. The model demonstrates how irrigated land-use expansion promotes the diffusion of alternative crops in the region, as well as how coupled social, biophysical and environmental conditions play an important role in crop selection. Our study shows that agricultural land use reflected the evolution of multiple simultaneous interacting biophysical and socio-economic drivers, including soil and climate type, crop and commodity prices, and the accumulated effects of interactive decisions of farmers.


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