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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Land System Science And Sustainable Development Of The Earth System: A Global Land Project Perspective, Peter H. Verburg, Neville Crossman, Erle C. Ellis, Andreas Heinimann, Patrick Hostert, Ole Mertz, Harini Nagendra, Thomas Sikor, Karl Heinz Erb, Nancy Golubiewski, Ricardo Grau, Morgan Grove, Souleymane Konaté, Patrick Meyfroidt, Dawn C. Parker, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Hideaki Shibata, Allison Thomson, Lin Zhen Dec 2015

Land System Science And Sustainable Development Of The Earth System: A Global Land Project Perspective, Peter H. Verburg, Neville Crossman, Erle C. Ellis, Andreas Heinimann, Patrick Hostert, Ole Mertz, Harini Nagendra, Thomas Sikor, Karl Heinz Erb, Nancy Golubiewski, Ricardo Grau, Morgan Grove, Souleymane Konaté, Patrick Meyfroidt, Dawn C. Parker, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Hideaki Shibata, Allison Thomson, Lin Zhen

Geography

Land systems are the result of human interactions with the natural environment. Understanding the drivers, state, trends and impacts of different land systems on social and natural processes helps to reveal how changes in the land system affect the functioning of the socio-ecological system as a whole and the tradeoff these changes may represent. The Global Land Project has led advances by synthesizing land systems research across different scales and providing concepts to further understand the feedbacks between social-and environmental systems, between urban and rural environments and between distant world regions. Land system science has moved from a focus on …


Rainfall Interception And The Coupled Surface Water And Energy Balance, Albert I.J.M. Van Dijk, John H. Gash, Eva Van Gorsel, Peter D. Blanken, Alessandro Cescatti, Carmen Emmel, Bert Gielen, Ian N. Harman, Gerard Kiely, Lutz Merbold, Leonardo Montagnani, Eddy Moors, Matteo Sottocornola, Andrej Varlagin, Christopher A. Williams, Georg Wohlfahrt Dec 2015

Rainfall Interception And The Coupled Surface Water And Energy Balance, Albert I.J.M. Van Dijk, John H. Gash, Eva Van Gorsel, Peter D. Blanken, Alessandro Cescatti, Carmen Emmel, Bert Gielen, Ian N. Harman, Gerard Kiely, Lutz Merbold, Leonardo Montagnani, Eddy Moors, Matteo Sottocornola, Andrej Varlagin, Christopher A. Williams, Georg Wohlfahrt

Geography

Evaporation from wet canopies (. E) can return up to half of incident rainfall back into the atmosphere and is a major cause of the difference in water use between forests and short vegetation. Canopy water budget measurements often suggest values of E during rainfall that are several times greater than those predicted from Penman-Monteith theory. Our literature review identified potential issues with both estimation approaches, producing several hypotheses that were tested using micrometeorological observations from 128 FLUXNET sites world-wide. The analysis shows that FLUXNET eddy-covariance measurements tend to provide unreliable measurements of E during rainfall. However, the other micrometeorological …


Forest Baseline And Deforestation Map Of The Dominican Republic Through The Analysis Of Time Series Of Modis Data, Florencia Sangermano, Leslie Bol, Pedro Galvis, Raymond E. Gullison, Jared Hardner, Gail S. Ross Sep 2015

Forest Baseline And Deforestation Map Of The Dominican Republic Through The Analysis Of Time Series Of Modis Data, Florencia Sangermano, Leslie Bol, Pedro Galvis, Raymond E. Gullison, Jared Hardner, Gail S. Ross

Geography

Deforestation is one of the major threats to habitats in the Dominican Republic. In this work we present a forest baseline for the year 2000 and a deforestation map for the year 2011. Maps were derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Radiometer (MODIS) products at 250. m resolution. The vegetation continuous fields product (MOD44B) for the year 2000 was used to produce the forest baseline, while the vegetation indices product (MOD13Q1) was used to detect change between 2000 and 2011. Major findings based on the data presented here are reported in the manuscript "Habitat suitability and protection status of four species …


High Carbon And Biodiversity Costs From Converting Africa's Wet Savannahs To Cropland, Timothy D. Searchinger, Lyndon Estes, Philip K. Thornton, Tim Beringer, An Notenbaert, Daniel Rubenstein, Ralph Heimlich, Rachel Licker, Mario Herrero May 2015

High Carbon And Biodiversity Costs From Converting Africa's Wet Savannahs To Cropland, Timothy D. Searchinger, Lyndon Estes, Philip K. Thornton, Tim Beringer, An Notenbaert, Daniel Rubenstein, Ralph Heimlich, Rachel Licker, Mario Herrero

Geography

Do the wet savannahs and shrublands of Africa provide a large reserve of potential croplands to produce food staples or bioenergy with low carbon and biodiversity costs? We find that only small percentages of these lands have meaningful potential to be low-carbon sources of maize (1/42%) or soybeans (9.5-11.5%), meaning that their conversion would release at least one-third less carbon per ton of crop than released on average for the production of those crops on existing croplands. Factoring in land-use change, less than 1% is likely to produce cellulosic ethanol that would meet European standards for greenhouse gas reductions. Biodiversity …


New Perspectives On An Iconic Landscape From Comparative International Long-Term Ecological Research, Evelyn E. Gaiser, Elizabeth P. Anderson, Edward Castañeda-Moya, Ligia Collado-Vides, James W.F. Ourqurean, Michael R. Heithaus, Rudolf Jaffé, David Lagomasino, Nicholas J. Oehm, Rene M. Price, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Tiffany G. Troxler Jan 2015

New Perspectives On An Iconic Landscape From Comparative International Long-Term Ecological Research, Evelyn E. Gaiser, Elizabeth P. Anderson, Edward Castañeda-Moya, Ligia Collado-Vides, James W.F. Ourqurean, Michael R. Heithaus, Rudolf Jaffé, David Lagomasino, Nicholas J. Oehm, Rene M. Price, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Tiffany G. Troxler

Geography

Iconic ecosystems like the Florida Coastal Everglades can serve as sentinels of environmental change from local to global scales. This characteristic can help inform general theory about how and why ecosystems transform, particularly if distinctive ecosystem properties are studied over long time scales and compared to those of similar ecosystems elsewhere. Here we review the ways in which long-term, comparative, international research has provided perspectives on iconic features of the Everglades that have, in turn, informed general ecosystem paradigms. Studies in other comparable wetlands from the Caribbean to Australia have shed light on distinctive and puzzling aspects such as the …


Implications Of Using 2 M Versus 30 M Spatial Resolution Data For Suburban Residential Land Change Modeling, S. D. Blanchard, R. G. Pontius, K. M. Urban Jan 2015

Implications Of Using 2 M Versus 30 M Spatial Resolution Data For Suburban Residential Land Change Modeling, S. D. Blanchard, R. G. Pontius, K. M. Urban

Geography

This study assesses the advantages and disadvantages of using 2 m spatial resolution data versus 30 m resolution data for a simulation model of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC). The model projects LUCC from 2005 to 2055 in the town of Lynnfield, Massachusetts, USA. This article describes four scenario storylines and then projects land-use and land-cover under each of the four scenarios with 2 m data and again with 30 m data. The disagreement between the 2 m output and its corresponding 30 m output ranges between 5.7% and 11.0% of the town. The disagreement due to allocation over small …


Mapping Cropland In Smallholder-Dominated Savannas: Integrating Remote Sensing Techniques And Probabilistic Modeling, Sean Sweeney, Tatyana Ruseva, Lyndon Estes, Tom Evans Jan 2015

Mapping Cropland In Smallholder-Dominated Savannas: Integrating Remote Sensing Techniques And Probabilistic Modeling, Sean Sweeney, Tatyana Ruseva, Lyndon Estes, Tom Evans

Geography

Traditional smallholder farming systems dominate the savanna range countries of sub-Saharan Africa and provide the foundation for the region's food security. Despite continued expansion of smallholder farming into the surrounding savanna landscapes, food insecurity in the region persists. Central to the monitoring of food security in these countries, and to understanding the processes behind it, are reliable, high-quality datasets of cultivated land. Remote sensing has been frequently used for this purpose but distinguishing crops under certain stages of growth from savanna woodlands has remained a major challenge. Yet, crop production in dryland ecosystems is most vulnerable to seasonal climate variability, …


Preface: Climate Extremes And Biogeochemical Cycles In The Terrestrial Biosphere: Impacts And Feedbacks Across Scales, M. Bahn, M. Reichstein, K. Guan, J. M. Moreno, Christopher A. Williams Jan 2015

Preface: Climate Extremes And Biogeochemical Cycles In The Terrestrial Biosphere: Impacts And Feedbacks Across Scales, M. Bahn, M. Reichstein, K. Guan, J. M. Moreno, Christopher A. Williams

Geography

No abstract provided.