Land-use change accounted for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2000, making it the second largest source of emissions, after the power sector. These emissions arise from a change in the management of land by humans, such as conversion of forests to pasture land. The following sections will explain the role of the land, that is plants and soils, in the natural carbon cycle, and how chan...

This paper reviews 91 recent empirical and theoretical studies that analyzed land-use change at the farm-household level. The review builds on a conceptual framework of land-use change drivers and conducts a meta-analysis. Results show that the conversion of forests into cultivated land or grassland, mainly used for agriculture or ranching, are most frequently analyzed. Only a small number of s...

In this paper, we describe a new change detection method that determines the date at which land-use changes occur in a sequential series of Landsat TM images. We use this approach to extract annual rates of land conversion in the Pearl River Delta, China, for the period 1988-1996. The technique is a three-step change detection procedure that uses time series and panel econometric methods. First...

In this study, a land use/land cover change analysis method was developed to examine patterns of land use/land cover conversions of cropland to urban uses and conversions of rangeland to cropland uses in the United States (US) Midwest region. We used the US 2001 and 2006 National Land Cover Datasets (NLCD) for our spatial analyses of these conversion trends. Our analysis showed that the eastern...

Accurately quantifying changes in soil carbon (C) stocks with land-use change is important for estimating the anthropogenic fluxes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and for implementing policies such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) that provide financial incentives to reduce carbon dioxide fluxes from deforestation and land degradation. Despite hundreds of fi...

Equilibrium experiments with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory’s climate model are used to investigate the impact of anthropogenic land cover change on climate. Regions of altered land cover include large portions of Europe, India, eastern China, and the eastern United States. Smaller areas of change are present in various tropical regions. This study focuses on the impacts of biophysic...

Forest harvesting is an important, ongoing disturbance that affects the composition, structure, and ecological function of the majority of the world’s forests. However, few studies have examined the interaction between land-use conversion and harvesting. We utilize a unique, spatially explicit database of all cutting events (n > 13,000) and land-cover conversions for Massachusetts over the past...