Roger F. Auch

The Need for Simultaneous Evaluation of Ecosystem Services and Land Use Change

). Even the most remote areas of the planet areinfluenced by human activities. Modern landscapes havebeen highly modified to accommodate a growing humanpopulation that the United Nations has forecast to peak at9.1billionby2050.Overthispastcentury,relianceonservicesfrom ecosystems has increased significantly and, over pastdecades,sustainabilityofourmodern,intensivelymanagedecosystemshasbeenatopicofseriousinternationalconcern(

THE DRIVING FORCES OF LAND CHANGE IN THE NORTHERN PIEDMONT OF THE UNITED STATES

Abstract. Driving forces facilitate or inhibit land‐use / land‐cover change. Human driving forces include political, economic, cultural, and social attributes that often change across time and space. Remotely sensed imagery provides regional land‐change data for the Northern Piedmont, an ecoregion of the United States that continued to urbanize after 1970 through conversion of agricultural and forest land covers to developed uses. Eight major driving forces facilitated most of the land conversion; other drivers inhibited or slowed change. A synergistic web of drivers may be more important in understanding land change than individual drivers by themselves.

Having It Both Ways? Land Use Change in a U.S. Midwestern Agricultural Ecoregion

Urbanization has been directly linked to decreases in area of agricultural lands and, as such, has been considered a threat to food security. Although the area of land used to produce food has diminished, often overlooked have been changes in agricultural output. The Eastern Corn Belt Plains (ECBP) is an important agricultural region in the U.S. Midwest. It has both gained a significant amount of urban land, primarily from the conversion of agricultural land between 1973 and 2000, and at the same time continued to produce ever-increasing quantities of agricultural products. By 2002, more corn, soybeans, and hogs were produced on a smaller agricultural land base than in 1974. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, ECBP ecoregion society appeared to have “had it both ways”: more urbanization along with increased agricultural output.

Assessing landscape change and processes of recurrence, replacement, and recovery in the Southeastern Coastal Plains, USA

Abstract The processes of landscape change are complex, exhibiting spatial variability as well as linear, cyclical, and reversible characteristics. To better understand the various processes that cause transformation, a data aggregation, validation, and attribution approach was developed and applied to an analysis of the Southeastern Coastal Plains (SECP). The approach integrates information from available national land-use, natural disturbance, and land-cover data to efficiently assess spatially-specific changes and causes. Between 2001 and 2006, the processes of change affected 7.8xa0% of the SECP but varied across small-scale ecoregions. Processes were placed into a simple conceptual framework to explicitly identify the type and direction of change based on three general characteristics: replacement, recurrence, and recovery. Replacement processes, whereby a land use or cover is supplanted by a new land use, including urbanization and agricultural expansion, accounted for approximately 15xa0% of the extent of change. Recurrent processes that contribute to cyclical changes in land cover, including forest harvest/replanting and fire, accounted for 83xa0%. Most forest cover changes were recurrent, while the extents of recurrentxa0silviculture and forestxa0replacement processes such as urbanization far exceeded forest recovery processes. The total extent of landscape recovery, from prior land use to natural or semi-natural vegetation cover, accounted for less than 3xa0% of change. In a region of complex change, increases inxa0transitory grassland and shrubland covers were caused by large-scale intensive plantation silviculture and small-scale activities including mining reclamation. Explicit identification ofxa0the process types and dynamicsxa0presented here may improve the understanding of land-cover change and landscape trajectory.

Regional assessment of North America: Urbanization trends, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem services

North America contains some of the most urbanized landscapes in the world. In the United States (U.S.) and Canada, approximately 80 % of the population is urban, with Mexico slightly less (Kaiser Family Foundation 2013). Population growth combined with economic growth has fueled recent urban land expansion in North America. Between 1970 and 2000, urban land area expanded at a rate of 3.31 % (Seto et al. 2011) creating unique challenges for conserving biodiversity and maintaining regional and local ecosystem services.

Human drivers, biophysical changes, and climatic variation affecting contemporary cropping proportions in the northern prairie of the U.S

ABSTRACT Grassland to cropland conversion in the northern prairie of the United States has been a topic of recent land use change studies. Within this region more corn and soybeans are grown now (2017) than in the past, but most studies to date have not examined multi-decadal trends and the synergistic web of socio-ecological driving forces involved, opting instead for short-term analyses and easily targeted agents of change. This paper examines the coalescing of biophysical and socioeconomic driving forces that have brought change to the agricultural landscape of this region between 1980 and 2013. While land conversion has occurred, most of the region’s cropland in 2013 had been previously cropped by the early 1980s. Furthermore, the agricultural conditions in which crops were grown during those three decades have changed considerably because of non-biophysical alterations to production practices and changing agricultural markets. Findings revealed that human drivers played more of a role in crop change than biophysical changes, that blending quantitative and qualitative methods to tell a more complete story of crop change in this region was difficult because of the synergistic characteristics of the drivers involved, and that more research is needed to understand how farmers make crop choice decisions.