Bridging Perspectives & Approaches in Characterizing Land Use/Land Cover Dynamics

Stephen J. Walsh &
Department of Geography & Carolina Population Center

Ronald R. Rindfuss
Department of Sociology & Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

It is now well recognized that, at local, regional, and global scales, land use changes are significantly altering land cover, perhaps at an accelerating pace. This transformation of the Earth's surface, particularly through deforestation, is, in turn, linked to a variety of scientific and policy issues affecting the Earth system. Further, the world's scientific community is increasingly recognizing what, in retrospect, should have been obvious: that human behavior and agency is a critical driver of land use and land cover change (LULCC). The development of predictive scenarios and models of LULC requires a basic understanding of human behavior and decision-making in conjunction with a wide variety of biophysical processes and spatial and temporal relationships. Theoretical and practical issues are involved in characterizing LULCC, and linking (and collecting) social science data from households and communities with remotely sensed data to study landscape dynamics. Linking people, place, and the environment often begins with people and links to the land, or starts with the land and links to people. Special challenges exist, because of inherent differences in how people and the environment are characterized in both space and time.

Theories and practices from the social, natural, and spatial sciences have been integrated within our population-environment studies, and are reflected in the form of our longitudinal social survey, image time-series, landscape characterizations, and the nature of the GIS coverages and analyses that have sought to examine migration patterns, landscape structure and change, and relationships between social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of LULC patterns. In the context of northeastern Thailand, it is readily apparent that individual, social, and structural processes occur at different scales and do so through feedbacks and thresholds within and across various thematic domains.

Here, we begin by describing the nature of our collaboration -- the theories that serve as context, the research questions that have framed our studies, the data sets that support our inquiries, the methods that integrate our perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and some of the circumstances that led us to collaborate in the first place. Further, we consider the joining of social science data with environmental data through the geography of place. We describe how we have sought to characterize our Thailand study site through remotely sensed data, longitudinal social survey data, and associated spatial digital data organized within a GIS. Finally, we describe our modeling approaches that involve scale dependent analyses, cartographic models and animations, and dynamic spatial simulations. We briefly describe the beginnings of a new study in which several LULCC scenarios are examined and used to perturb a base model of LULCC related to village settlement patterns. We incorporate Complexity theory by having a set of on-going processes and relationships that are non-linear and which embody hierarchical linkages operating with time lags and scale dependencies. We conclude by commenting on the direction of our research, the evolving make-up of our research team to address new research opportunities, and how our research agendas have broadened as we capitalize on the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration.