Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Land Change (Systems) Science
B. L. Turner II
Introduction
Land change science (alternatively, land systems science) is a rapidly emerging,
interdisciplinary fi eld of study that seeks to understand, explain, and project land-
use and land-cover dynamics (Turner, 2002; Gutman et al., 2004; Turner et al.,
2007). It has been stimulated by international concern regarding global environ-
mental change, the search for sustainability, and the recognition of the pivotal role
of land dynamics in both. Neither the recognition of the human impress on the land
(Marsh, 1965[1864]; Thomas, 1956) nor the need for a formal approach to its
study, captured in the German geographic concept of landschaft , is new. The totality
of land changes currently underway and their far-fl ung consequences (Steffen et al.,
2003) are unprecedented, however, spawning a new-found need for integrative
studies of land systems dynamics. In this sense, land change or land systems science
may be viewed as a reinvention of landscahft research with a face decidedly gazing
at the environmental sciences at large.
Matching Nature on Land
The human dominion over the terrestrial surface of the earth is well documented.
Thirty-to-fi fty percent of the land surface has been transformed - radically altered
- by human activities (Vitousek et al., 1997), an area roughly the size of South
America has been taken to cultivation (Raven, 2002), and virtually no land surface
may be considered 'pristine' if co-evolved landscapes, both forest and grasslands,
human-induced climate change, and tropospheric pollution are considered (Meyer
and Turner, 1994). Land change joins industrial change to elevate human activity
more-or-less equivalent to nature in affecting the biogeochemical fl ows that sustain
the biosphere, leading some expert to suggest that humankind has entered the
'Anthropocene' (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).
The antiquity of local-to-regional scale land changes of import to society and the
environment has long been understood (Thomas, 1956; Redman, 1999). Recent
evidence, however, supports interpretations of continental-to-global scale human
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