scholarly journals Earth transformed: detailed mapping of global human modification from 1990 to 2017

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 1953-1972 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Theobald ◽  
Christina Kennedy ◽  
Bin Chen ◽  
James Oakleaf ◽  
Sharon Baruch-Mordo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
Global Rate ◽  
Human Modification ◽  
Natural Land ◽  
Abstract Data ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Environmental Mitigation ◽  
Global Datasets

Abstract. Data on the extent, patterns, and trends of human land use are critically important to support global and national priorities for conservation and sustainable development. To inform these issues, we created a series of detailed global datasets for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 to evaluate temporal and spatial trends of land use modification of terrestrial lands (excluding Antarctica). We found that the expansion of and increase in human modification between 1990 and 2015 resulted in 1.6 M km2 of natural land lost. The percent change between 1990 and 2015 was 15.2 % or 0.6 % annually – about 178 km2 daily or over 12 ha min−1. Worrisomely, we found that the global rate of loss has increased over the past 25 years. The greatest loss of natural lands from 1990 to 2015 occurred in Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and the biomes with the greatest loss were mangroves, tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, and tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests. We also created a contemporary (∼2017) estimate of human modification that included additional stressors and found that globally 14.6 % or 18.5 M km2 (±0.0013) of lands have been modified – an area greater than Russia. Our novel datasets are detailed (0.09 km2 resolution), temporal (1990–2015), recent (∼2017), comprehensive (11 change stressors, 14 current), robust (using an established framework and incorporating classification errors and parameter uncertainty), and strongly validated. We believe these datasets support an improved understanding of the profound transformation wrought by human activities and provide foundational data on the amount, patterns, and rates of landscape change to inform planning and decision-making for environmental mitigation, protection, and restoration. The datasets generated from this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3963013 (Theobald et al., 2020).

scholarly journals Earth transformed: detailed mapping of global human modification from 1990 to 2017

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Theobald ◽  
Christina Kennedy ◽  
Bin Chen ◽  
James Oakleaf ◽  
Sharon Baruch-Mordo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
Global Rate ◽  
Human Modification ◽  
Natural Land ◽  
Abstract Data ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Environmental Mitigation ◽  
Global Datasets

Abstract. Data on the extent, patterns, and trends of human land use are critically important to support global and national priorities for conservation and sustainable development. To inform these issues, we created a series of detailed global datasets for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 to evaluate temporal and spatial trends of land use modification of terrestrial lands (excluding Antarctica). We found that the expansion and increase of human modification between 1990 and 2015 resulted in 1.6 M km2 of natural land lost. The percent change between 1990 and 2015 was 15.2 % or 0.61 % annually – roughly 178 km2 daily. Over the pause of a deep breath, over 8 football pitches of natural lands were lost (~ 17 per minute). Worrisomely, we found that the global rate of loss has increased over the past 25 years. The greatest loss of natural lands from 1990–2015 occurred in Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and the biomes with the greatest loss were mangroves, tropical & subtropical moist broadleaf forests, and tropical & subtropical dry broadleaf forests. We also created a contemporary (~ 2017) estimate of human modification that included additional stressors and found that globally 14.5 % or 18.5 M km2 of lands have been completely modified – an area greater than Russia. Our novel datasets are detailed (0.09 km2 resolution), temporal (1990–2015), recent (~ 2017), comprehensive (11 change stressors, 14 current), robust (using an established framework and incorporating classification errors and parameter uncertainty), and strongly validated. We believe these datasets will support better understanding of the profound transformation wrought by human activities and provide foundational data on the amounts, patterns, and rates of change to inform planning and decision making for environmental mitigation, protection, restoration, and adaptation to climate change. The datasets generated from this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rbs1 (Theobald et al., 2020).

scholarly journals Soil carbon debt of 12,000 years of human land use

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (36) ◽  
pp. 9575-9580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sanderman ◽  
Tomislav Hengl ◽  
Gregory J. Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Carbon Balance ◽  
Mitigation Strategy ◽  
Global Environment ◽  
Climate Mitigation ◽  
Grazing Land ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
History Database ◽  
Global Carbon

Human appropriation of land for agriculture has greatly altered the terrestrial carbon balance, creating a large but uncertain carbon debt in soils. Estimating the size and spatial distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) loss due to land use and land cover change has been difficult but is a critical step in understanding whether SOC sequestration can be an effective climate mitigation strategy. In this study, a machine learning-based model was fitted using a global compilation of SOC data and the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) land use data in combination with climatic, landform and lithology covariates. Model results compared favorably with a global compilation of paired plot studies. Projection of this model onto a world without agriculture indicated a global carbon debt due to agriculture of 133 Pg C for the top 2 m of soil, with the rate of loss increasing dramatically in the past 200 years. The HYDE classes “grazing” and “cropland” contributed nearly equally to the loss of SOC. There were higher percent SOC losses on cropland but since more than twice as much land is grazed, slightly higher total losses were found from grazing land. Important spatial patterns of SOC loss were found: Hotspots of SOC loss coincided with some major cropping regions as well as semiarid grazing regions, while other major agricultural zones showed small losses and even net gains in SOC. This analysis has demonstrated that there are identifiable regions which can be targeted for SOC restoration efforts.

Advances in Understanding Landscape Influences on Freshwater Habitats and Biological Assemblages

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Stream Ecosystems ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
Natural Land ◽  
Stream Biota ◽  
Land Use And Cover

<i>Abstract.</i>—Surrounding land use and cover can have profound effects on the physical, chemical, and biological properties of stream ecosystems. For this reason, changes in land use and cover throughout catchments often have strong effects on stream ecosystems that are particularly interesting to researchers. Additionally, natural physical and climatic, or physiographic, characteristics are important for determining natural land cover and constraining human land use and are also strongly related to stream habitat and biota. Because the physiographic template differs among catchments and is an important mediator of catchment processes, it is important to account for natural physiographic differences among catchments to understand the relationship between land use/cover and stream biota. In this paper, we develop and assess the usefulness of a regional framework, land use/cover distinguished physiographic regions (LDPRs), which is designed for understanding relationships between land use/cover and stream biota while accounting for the physiographic template. We classified hydrologic units into LDPRs based on physiographic predictors of land use and cover for the eastern and western United States through the use of multivariate regression tree analysis. Next, we used case study data to assess the usefulness of LDPRs by determining if the relationships between fish assemblage function and land use/cover varied among classes using hierarchical logistic regression models. Eight physiographic characteristics determined land cover patterns for both the eastern and western United States and were used to classify hydrologic units into LDPR classes. Five commonly used biotic metrics describing trophic, reproductive, and taxonomic groupings of fish species responded in varying ways to agriculture and urban land use across LDPRs in the upper Mississippi River basin. Our findings suggest that physiographic differences among hydrologic units result in different pathways by which land use and cover affects stream fish assemblages and that LDPRs are useful for stratifying hydrologic units to investigate those different processes. Unlike other commonly used regional frameworks, the rationale and methods used to develop LDPRs properly account for the often-confounded relationship between physiography and land use/cover when relating land cover to stream biota. Therefore, we recommend the use and refinement of LDPRs or similarly developed regional frameworks so that the varying processes by which human land use results in stream degradation can be better understood.

Environmental change and human land‐use over the past 200 years in the Great Hinggan Mountains, Northeastern China

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia L. Mackenzie ◽  
Kunshan Bao ◽  
Steve Pratte ◽  
Anna‐Marie Klamt ◽  
Rongqin Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Northeastern China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Land Use

scholarly journals Species-Rich National Forests Experience More Intense Human Modification, but Why?

Forests ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 753 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Belote
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Forest Service ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
Human Footprint ◽  
Geographic Patterns ◽  
Human Modification ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Using Data

Ecologists have studied geographic gradients in biodiversity for decades and recently mapped the intensity of the “human footprint” around the planet. The combination of these efforts have identified some global hotspots of biodiversity that are heavily impacted by human-caused land cover change and infrastructure. However, other hotspots of biodiversity experience less intense modifications from humans. Relationships between species diversity and the human footprint may be driven by covarying factors, like climate, soils, or topography, that coincidentally influence patterns of biodiversity and human land use. Here, I investigated relationships between tree species richness and the degree of human modification among Forest Service ranger districts within the contiguous US. Ranger districts with more tree species tended to experience greater human modification. Using data on climate, soils, and topography, I explored mechanisms explaining the positive relationship between tree richness and human modification. I found that climate is related to both tree richness and human modification, which may be indirectly mediated through climate’s role governing productivity. Ranger districts with more productive climates support more species and greater human modification. To explore potential conservation consequences of these relationships, I also investigated whether the amount of area designated within highly protected conservation lands were related to climate, productivity, and topography. Less productive ranger districts with steeper slopes tended to experience the greatest relative amounts of conservation protection. Combined, these results suggest that complex relationships explain the geographic patterns of biodiversity and the human footprint, but that climate and topography partially govern patterns of each.

Temporal and spatial variations of land use and the driving factors in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in the past 25 years

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
胡昕利 HU Xinli ◽  
易扬 YI Yang ◽  
康宏樟 KANG Hongzhang ◽  
王彬 WANG Bin ◽  
史明昌 SHI Mingchang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Yangtze River ◽  
Spatial Variations ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
The Yangtze River ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Variations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

Spatial Analysis of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on the Basis of RS and GIS

2011 ◽  
Vol 90-93 ◽  
pp. 1711-1714
Author(s):  
Ming Yang Yu ◽  
Fei Meng ◽  
Jian Cui
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Land Cover Changes ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Variation ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rs And Gis ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Large Scale Land

The two-period (1990 and 2010) remote sensing images in Longkou City are selected in this article.The temporal and spatial variation of land use in Longkou City is monitored and analyzed by Geo-information Tupu and transfer matrix. Results show that the pattern of the land use change of Longkou City from year 1990 to year 2010 has changed a lot. The relatively stable area accounts for 74.33%, Garden land increases a lot and the increasing area is 14706.53 hm2,accounting for 16.48%. In the past ten years, there is no large-scale land arrangement, so the reason of the change is the economic interests.

Black carbon and charcoal records of fire and human land use over the past 1300 years at the Tongguan Kiln archaeological site, China

2018 ◽  
Vol 504 ◽  
pp. 162-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihai Tan ◽  
Longjiang Mao ◽  
Yongming Han ◽  
Duowen Mo ◽  
Haibin Gu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Black Carbon ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Land Use

Land use, water and Mediterranean landscapes: modelling long-term dynamics of complex socio-ecological systems

2010 ◽  
Vol 368 (1931) ◽  
pp. 5275-5297 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Barton ◽  
Isaac I. Ullah ◽  
Sean Bergin
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Land Use Land Cover ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Mediterranean Landscapes ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The evolution of Mediterranean landscapes during the Holocene has been increasingly governed by the complex interactions of water and human land use. Different land-use practices change the amount of water flowing across the surface and infiltrating the soil, and change water’s ability to move surface sediments. Conversely, water amplifies the impacts of human land use and extends the ecological footprint of human activities far beyond the borders of towns and fields. Advances in computational modelling offer new tools to study the complex feedbacks between land use, land cover, topography and surface water. The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics project (MedLand) is building a modelling laboratory where experiments can be carried out on the long-term impacts of agropastoral land use, and whose results can be tested against the archaeological record. These computational experiments are providing new insights into the socio-ecological consequences of human decisions at varying temporal and spatial scales.

High resolution ancient sedimentary DNA shows that alpine plant biodiversity is a result of human land use

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Garcés-Pastor ◽  
Eric Coissac ◽  
Sebastien Lavergne ◽  
Christoph Schwoerer ◽  
Jean-Paul Theurillat ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
European Alps ◽  
Biodiversity Hotspots ◽  
Plant Biodiversity ◽  
Reference Library ◽  
Alpine Plant ◽  
Plant Richness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Land Use

Abstract Alpine areas are well known biodiversity hotspots, but their future may be threatened by expanding forest and changing human land use. Here, we reconstructed past vegetation, climate, and livestock over the past ~ 12,000 years from Lake Sulsseewli (European Alps), based on sedimentary ancient DNA, pollen, spores, chironomids, and microcharcoal. We assembled a highly-complete local DNA reference library (PhyloAlps, 3,923 plant species), and used this to obtain an exceptionally rich sedaDNA record of 366 plant taxa. The vegetation mainly responded to temperature during the first half of the Holocene, while human activity drove changes from 6 ka onwards. Land-use shifted from episodic grazing (Neolithic, Bronze Age) to agropastoral intensification (Medieval Age). This prompted a coexistence of species typically found at different elevational belts, thereby increasing plant richness to levels that characterise present-day alpine diversity. Our results indicate that traditional agropastoral activities should be maintained to prevent reforestation and preserve alpine plant biodiversity.

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