Project Title Land Use Change in Amazonia: Institutional Analysis and Modelling at multiple temporal and spatial scales (LUA/IAM)

1 Summary This project aims to understand and model the social processes that contribute to large-scale deforestation in Amazonia. Biomass burning emissions associated with deforestation in the region are responsible for 74% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions and have an impact on global environmental changes. We argue that land changes in Amazonia are brought about by social and institutional arrangements that need to be better understood and incorporated into Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) models. Thus we propose to explore the following core scientific question: How interrelated are the trajectories of land systems and the evolution of institutional arrangements in Amazonia? We will study how human-induced land change over the past 40 years results from the institutional arrangements that influence how the region´s resources are controlled and owned. These arrangements act upon land tenure, territorial planning, market chains, and public policies. The project incorporates comparative case studies, each organized along four interrelated lines of research, combining methods from different academic areas, including social analysis of institutional arrangements, remote sensing, landscape ecology, and dynamic modelling. Results from the case studies will allow us to establish interrelations between the land systems and the institutional arrangements, and enable an analytical understanding of the driving causes of change at different scales. Findings will be incorporated into multiscale LUCC models to produce scenarios of possible trajectories of deforestation in Amazonia. We expect the project to provide the basis for developing more robust environmental models, which consider the complexity of social interactions in Amazonia, and to allow researchers to study the relations between deforestation and climate change. Summary of results: The project made a detailed study of the social exclusion, segregation and urban growth patterns in São Paulo and other important Brazilian cities using spatial analysis methods. The project also developed spatial analysis techniques for modelling regionalization, segregation and urban growth. The project results led to many journal and conference papers and two books: one in Spatial Data Analysis and other on Geoinformatics for Urban Studies. automata modelling of urban land use dynamics: empirical development and estimation. " regionalisation techniques for socioeconomic geographical units using minimum spanning trees ". Summary of results: OpenModeller's project goal is to develop a web-based software to support the work of scientists in predictive modelling of species distribution. INPE´s