A CIESIN Thematic Guide to Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC)

Humans have been altering land cover since pre-history through the use of fire to flush out game and, since the advent of plant and animal domestication, through the clearance of patches of land for agriculture and livestock. In the past two centuries the impact of human activities on the land has grown enormously, altering entire landscapes, and ultimately impacting the earth’s nutrient and hydrological cycles as well as climate. Land-use and land-cover changes are local and place specific, occurring incrementally in ways that often escape our attention. Yet, collectively, they add up to one of the most important facets of global environmental change. This thematic guide provides an introduction to these changes, and walks the readers through important topics in land-use and land-cover change research: deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, land cover and the water cycle, land cover and the carbon cycle, and urbanization. How to Use this Guide Note: Readers using the PDF version of this Thematic Guide may be interested in the additional functionality, described below, which is provided solely in the HTML version available through: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/tg/guide_frame.jsp?g=47 The richness of this guide resides in the many and varied links to bibliographic resources, many of which are available on-line. Readers are encouraged to toggle between the written sections and the references and related resources to gain a better sense of the breadth of research in this important area of study. Note that references are dynamically linked to sections of the guide. The Reference section in the table of contents provides references for the entire guide, but when one toggles to references from a particular chapter or section, only references for that chapter or section will appear. The LUCC Guide's bibliography exceeds 1,300 entries, many of which were not specifically cited in the text. To access the larger bibliography, users are encouraged to use the bibliographic search page. A full description of CIESIN Thematic Guide functionality can be found by accessing the help page from the navigation bar.