Urbanization and climate changes have direct impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide to society, thus influencing human well-being and health. Urban sprawl may conflict with ecosystem services, e.g. enhancing water-related stresses and risks of, e.g., droughts and floods, with significant economic, environmental and societal impacts.
Cropland expansion threatens biodiversity by driving habitat loss and impacts carbon storage through loss of biomass and soil carbon (C). There is a growing concern land use change (LUC) to cropland will result in a loss of ecosystem function and various ecosystem services essential for human health and wellbeing.
With the growing recognition that effective action on climate change will require a combination of emissions reductions and carbon sequestration, protecting, enhancing and restoring natural carbon sinks have become political priorities. Mangrove forests are considered some of the most carbon-dense ecosystems in the world with most of the carbon stored in the soil.
Land abandonment is widespread in the Mediterranean mountains. The impact of agricultural abandonment results in a shift in ecosystem evolution due to changes in soil erosion, but little is known about long-term soil and water losses.
The transition from fossil to renewable energy needs changes in land use. The development of renewable energy sources introduce extra and sometimes new externalities, such as shadows and noise on landscape. There are governments who are experiencing difficulties when developing renewable energy sources especially when existing land owners (and others) start anticipating on those externalities.
The continuous rise in the global demand for palm oil has resulted in large-scale expansion of industrial oil palm plantations - largely at the expense of primary and secondary forests. The potentially negative environmental impacts of these conversions have given rise to closer scrutiny.
Causal explanations of land change are fundamental in land system science, yet existing findings are difficult to synthesize due to the imprecise terminology and the various analytical frameworks they have applied.
Explorations of future land use change are important to understand potential conflicts between competing land uses, trade-offs associated with particular land change trajectories, and the effectiveness of policies to steer land systems into desirable states.
This in-depth study quantifies the spatio-temporal long-term land use/land cover change (LUCC) in the Mula Pravara river basin, and uncovers major drivers of these changes. The river basin is located in a semi-arid region of Maharashtra state, India.
In Indonesia, land cover change for agriculture and mining is threatening tropical forests, biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, land cover change is highly dynamic and complex and varies over time and space.
