Rapid deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia is presently occurring due to the expansion of palm oil and rubber production, fueled by an increasing global demand. Our study aimed to assess changes in soil-N cycling rates with conversion of forest to oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) and rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations. In Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia, we selected two soil landscapes - loa...

In this study, we analyze the effect of property taxes on changes between agricultural, forestry, Conservation Reserve Program, and developed land uses in Louisiana. We estimate a random parameters logit model of land-use conversion from the National Resources Inventory plot data. Our results indicate that land-use changes are inelastic with respect to property taxes. Simulation shows that curr...

Privately owned forests, wetlands, and crop-lands in the United States are disappearing at alarming rates due to development and erosion , according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on 7 December 1999. The report, which summarizes the USDA's 1997 National Resources Inventory (NRI), reveals that development has doubled during the last decade to-more than three mi...

Clearing tropical vegetation impacts biodiversity, the provision of ecosystem services, and thus ultimately human welfare. We quantified changes in land cover from 2000 to 2015 across the Cerrado biome of northern Minas Gerais state, Brazil. We assessed the potential biophysical and socio-economic drivers of the loss of Cerrado, natural regeneration and net cover change at the municipality leve...

Understanding landscape conversion is vital for assessing the impacts of ecological and anthropogenic disturbances at regional and global scales. Since rangelands cover nearly half of the global land surface, and because a large part of rangelands is located in semi-arid ecosystems, they serve as critical land cover types for determining regional biodiversity, global biogeochemical cycles, and ...

Kline, Jeffrey D.; Alig, Ralph J. 2001. A spatial model of land use change for western Oregon and western Washington. Res. Pap. PNW-RP-528. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 24 p. We developed an empirical model describing the probability that forests and farmland in western Oregon and western Washington were developed for resident...

There is an emerging consensus that protected areas are key in reducing adverse land-cover change, but their efficacy remains difficult to quantify. Many previous assessments of protected area effectiveness have compared changes between sets of protected and unprotected sites that differ systematically in other potentially confounding respects (e.g. altitude, accessibility), have considered onl...

Ecology may benefit from long term, large scale experiments on low intensity farming to test theoretical principles and convert them into practical lessons. One century of land conversion in the Argentine pampas, and its effect on critical ecological properties, were analysed and discussed. Land transformation has resulted in significant changes of land use, land cover, energy flow, nutrient dy...

Meta-analysis of case studies has become an important tool for synthesizing case study findings in land change. Meta-analyses of deforestation, urbanization, desertification and change in shifting cultivation systems have been published. This present study adds to this literature, with an analysis of the proximate causes and underlying forces of wetland conversion at a global scale using two co...

Robust quantitative estimates of land use and land cover change are necessary to develop policy solutions and interventions aimed towards sustainable land management. Here, we evaluated the combination of Landsat and L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to estimate land use/cover change in the dynamic tropical landscape of Tanintharyi, southern Myanmar. We classified Landsat and L-band SA...