LCCMcons · Using Land Cover Change Models to Address Important Conservation Issues
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-05-01 → 2018-04-30
- EU contribution
- €159,461
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Using Land Cover Change Models to Address Important Conservation Issues
Land use and land cover change driven by rapid human population growth and increasing demand for agricultural is a huge environmental risk. Tools, such as models and scenarios, that allow policy-makers and landscape managers to visualize and understand the impact of their decisions, prior to its implementation, are of the utmost importance. In this project, a spatially-explicit land cover change model was adapted and used to illustrate the usefulness of these tools in supporting policy- and decision-makers in addressing a range of conservations challenges. Particularly, I analysed historical trends in land cover change at several spatial scales, and how it varied inside and outside protected areas; I assessed the impact of planned infrastructure in the forests of Colombia; and the likelihood of multiple forest cover transitions in the Atlantic Forest to help direct conservation and restoration programmes. Further, by means of a large collaborative work under the Intergovernmental Science Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), I led the paper with the framework for the next-generation scenarios for IPBES; and subsequently, co-developed the protocol for comparing scenarios produced by multiple biodiversity and ecosystem services models when projecting changes under alternative human pathways of development. Finally, I also used these tools to simulate future land use change in Portugal as a result of following two alternative sustainable pathways of development. With the research performed during these two years I elevated my profile in the field of scenario development and analysis, by not only strengthening my capacity as a land use and land cover change modeler, but also gaining strong skills in associated disciplines such as biodiversity and ecosystem services modeling.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Anthropogenic land use/land cover change (LULCC) is now one of the major causes of biodiversity loss and the second largest source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Policy-makers face a challenging task when making decisions that impact the future of the landscapes with great levels of uncertainty about its outcome. Spatially-explicit LULCC models can be important tools to help assessing the outcome of such decisions a piori. However, modelling anthropogenic processes is a great challenge. Not only is the physical environment itself highly variable, but the underlying processes that drive LULCC combine socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental factors. Although enormous advances have been made in the field of LULCC modelling over the past couple of decades, there is room for improvement as these models still lack the ability to project both the rate and location of future change accurately. Improving these models would dramatically increase their potential to help solving real-world problems. Therefore, this research proposal will improve an existing LCCM to be able to incorporate region- and land-use transition specific parameters, representing observed relationships between proximate causes and drivers of LULCC, which vary over time and space. By the means of two real-world case studies, on different biomes (Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem and the Brazilian Atlantic Forest), this project will show how a LULCC model can be used to tackle two important worldwide conservation issues: the conflict between infrastructure development and conservation (Serengeti) and the impacts of implementing financial incentives to promote forest restoration (Atlantic Forest). Ultimately, this research proposal will provide a framework for robust decision-making under uncertainty, particularly when considering potential trade-offs between socio-economic and ecological implications at different scales, and a tool for aiding management of stakeholders' conflicts due to LULCC.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITAT HALLE-WITTENBERG · HalleCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union