Monitoring Land Use/Land Cover Changes and its Environmental Impacts in Karst Mountain Ecosystem: a spatial analysis integrating RS, GIS, social survey and climate data
Investigator
Huang Qiuhao, Department of Resources, Peking University, Beijing, China
E-mail: qhhuang(at)pku.edu.cn
Abstract
Human activities, together with global and regional environmental change have deeply altered the Earth’s surface environment during the last 50 years. One of the obvious manifestations is land use / land cover change, which affect the various ecosystems’ structure and function greatly. In recent years, plenty of serious resources, ecological and environmental problems have occurred in the Karst Mountain Ecosystem, Southwestern China, which is one of the largest Karst geomorphology distributing areas in the world with the extremely fragile ecological environment. Studying Land use change and its environmental effect there has profound significance. With the global (regional) environmental change and China’s political economy transitions since 1977, land use changes there greatly, such as the fast expanding croplands, urban areas and seriously degraded land. Yet it is still unclear how land use/ cover changes are driven by the socio-economic processes and how to evaluate the vulnerability and resilience of land system. The significance of this research lies in
- enhances people’s understanding of dynamic of land system in Karst Mountain Ecosystem
- provides a way of linking social and natural science interests to serve the research of land system change
- expands the information base on different land use practices to characterize these activities and evaluate how ecosystems’ structure and function are affected by changes in land use.
URL
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