NASA LCLUC

Principal Investigator:  Giorgos Mountrakis How broad - scale factors impinge on local decision making and translate into land use change is not well understood. This is particularly true of the vast rangelands of the Altai Mountains in central Asia where grazing was and remains the dominant form of agriculture and land use. Critical questions remain about what communities, donors, and policymakers can do to promote desirable co - management outcomes in grazing systems of this ecologically similar region but politically complex region which remains in upheaval following the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the heavy subsidies it once provided to herding societies. Our study takes a nested approach that first contrasts long - term, broad - scale vegetation dynamics for the same high montane grasslands occupied by Kazakh peoples herding livestock across four countries with strikingly different political systems Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan and China (regional mod...

Principal Investigator: Geoffrey Henebry Prior to the S oviet era, highlanders in Cen tral Asia practiced vertical transhumance  in  raising livestock-sheep and goats-for wool, me at, milk, and hides. Collectivization disrupted this practice with multiple external subsidies. Since 1991 montane agro-pastoralism has been disrupted by withdrawal of external subsides and introduction of a market economy.  Moreover,  m ontane agropastoralism is highly vulnerable to environmental change. Our project evaluates four aspects of environmental change in human settlements and associated pasturelands in representative areas  in the  Kyrgyz  Republic during the satellite era  and projected changes into the middle of the 21st century to assess impacts on these highland communities and the pastures upon which they depend. The four aspects of environmental change are (1) changes in the thermal regime ,  including growin...

    Principal Investigator: Andrew Hansen Mountain landscapes support our largest wildland ecosystems and thus are critically important for conservation. Human development is now intensifying in many mountain systems due to advances in technology. Consequently, conservation planning requires credible projections of future human land cover and use (LCLUC) and potential impacts on biodiversity. Our goal is to project LCLUC under IPCC scenarios across western US mountain landscapes to enhance vulnerability assessments of biodiversity to future global change. Quantifying Land Use Change.  Among the fastest increasing land use types in rural landscapes is rural residential development, which it too fine to be mapped with Landsat-scale satellite data. We are quantifying rates of change in RRD, resource extraction, and other major land uses through stratified random sampling of 100-m subplots within 1-km plots. Strata include: rural/urban, new west / old west ...

By:   Jamon Van Den Hoek Principal Investigator:  Jefferson Fox       This project seeks to document forest cover change dynamics in mountainous Nepal in order to assess the influence of regional drivers such as community forest management. Though community forests occupy nearly 23% of Nepal's total forest area (1.2 million ha) and over 40% of Nepal's population is involved in community forestry, the spatially-explicit impacts of community forest-driven management on forest cover dynamics have never been documented. This shortcoming results in part from Nepal's extreme topographic relief that introduces variable solar illumination and shading on the country's forests, inhibiting repeat satellite monitoring of forest cover condition and extent. The first stage of our study directly addresses these challenges by developing a forest cover mapping approach that includes a rigorous evaluation of terrain correction approaches and a disturbance detectio...

  Principal Investigator: Son Nghiem Abstract: Information about wetland dynamics remains a major missing gap in characterizing, understanding, and projecting changes in atmospheric methane and terrestrial water storage. A review of current satellite methods to delineate and monitor wetland change shows some recent advances, but much improved sensing technologies are still needed for wetland mapping, not only to provide more accurate global inventories but also to examine changes spanning multiple decades. Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometry (GNSS-R) signatures from aircraft over the Ebro River Delta in Spain and satellite measurements over the Mississippi River and adjacent watersheds demonstrate that inundated wetlands can be identified under different vegetation conditions including a dense rice canopy and a thick forest with tall trees, where optical sensors and monostatic radars provide limited capabilities. Advantages as well as constraints of GNSS-R are...

Principal Investigator:  Peilei Fan Abstract: Using Barcelona and Shanghai as case studies, we examined the nature-based solutions (NBS) in urban settings-specifically within cities experiencing post-industrialization and globalization. Our specific research questions are: (1) What are the spatiotemporal changes in urban built-up land and green space in Barcelona and Shanghai? (2) What are the relationships between economic development, exemplified by post-industrialization, globalization, and urban green space? Urban land use and green space change were evaluated using data derived from a variety of sources, including satellite images, landscape matrix indicators, and a land conversion matrix. The relationships between economic development, globalization, and environmental quality were analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling based on secondary statistical data. Both Barcelona and Shanghai have undergone rapid urbanization, with urb...