Franziska Albrecht

Downgrading Recent Estimates of Land Available for Biofuel Production

Recent estimates of additional land available for bioenergy production range from 320 to 1411 million ha. These estimates were generated from four scenarios regarding the types of land suitable for bioenergy production using coarse-resolution inputs of soil productivity, slope, climate, and land cover. In this paper, these maps of land availability were assessed using high-resolution satellite imagery. Samples from these maps were selected and crowdsourcing of Google Earth images was used to determine the type of land cover and the degree of human impact. Based on this sample, a set of rules was formulated to downward adjust the original estimates for each of the four scenarios that were previously used to generate the maps of land availability for bioenergy production. The adjusted land availability estimates range from 56 to 1035 million ha depending upon the scenario and the ruleset used when the sample is corrected for bias. Large forest areas not intended for biofuel production purposes were present in all scenarios. However, these numbers should not be considered as definitive estimates but should be used to highlight the uncertainty in attempting to quantify land availability for biofuel production when using coarse-resolution inputs with implications for further policy development.

A global dataset of crowdsourced land cover and land use reference data

Global land cover is an essential climate variable and a key biophysical driver for earth system models. While remote sensing technology, particularly satellites, have played a key role in providing land cover datasets, large discrepancies have been noted among the available products. Global land use is typically more difficult to map and in many cases cannot be remotely sensed. In-situ or ground-based data and high resolution imagery are thus an important requirement for producing accurate land cover and land use datasets and this is precisely what is lacking. Here we describe the global land cover and land use reference data derived from the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing platform via four campaigns. These global datasets provide information on human impact, land cover disagreement, wilderness and land cover and land use. Hence, they are relevant for the scientific community that requires reference data for global satellite-derived products, as well as those interested in monitoring global terrestrial ecosystems in general.

Global food markets, trade and the cost of climate change adaptation

Achieving food security in the face of climate change is a major challenge for humanity in the 21st century but comprehensive analyses of climate change impacts, including global market feedbacks are still lacking. In the context of uneven impacts of climate change across regions interconnected through trade, climate change impact and adaptation policies in one region need to be assessed in a global framework. Focusing on four Eastern Asian countries and using a global integrated modeling framework we show that i) once imports are considered, the overall climate change impact on the amount of food available could be of opposite sign to the direct domestic impacts and ii) production and trade adjustments following price signals could reduce the spread of climate change impacts on food availability. We then investigated how pressure on the food system in Eastern Asia could be mitigated by a consumer support policy. We found that the costs of adaptation policies to 2050 varied greatly across climate projections. The costs of consumer support policies would also be lower if only implemented in one region but market price leakage could exacerbate pressure on food systems in other regions. We conclude that climate adaptation should no longer be viewed only as a geographically isolated local problem.

Mapping Human Impact Using Crowdsourcing

This chapter outlines how crowdsourcing and Google Earth have been used to create the first global crowdsourced map of human impact. Human impact in this context refers to the degree to which the landscape has been modified by humans as visible from satellite imagery on Google Earth. As human impact is measured on a continuum, it could be used to indicate the wildest areas on the Earth. This bottom-up approach to mapping using the crowd is in contrast to more traditional GIS-based wilderness mapping methods, which integrate proximity-based layers of remoteness and indicators of biophysical naturalness in a top-down manner. Data on human impact were collected via a number of different data collection campaigns using Geo-Wiki, a tool for visualization, crowdsourcing and validation of global land cover. An overview of the crowdsourced data is provided, along with the resulting map of human impact and a visual comparison with the map of human footprint (Sanderson EW, Jaiteh M, Levy MA, et al. BioSci 52:891–904. doi: 10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0891:THFATL]2.0.CO;2, 2002).