Research projects
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Below are the research projects which have been granted endorsement by the Scientific Steering Committee of GLP:
- North American Land Change: Decision Making in Coupled Human-Environment Systems. Steven M. Manson, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. This project advances understanding of decision making in coupled human-environment systems by explaining the patterns, processes, and impacts of two critical forms of land change: urbanization and deforestation. Read more...
- Fire-Land-Atmosphere Modeling and Evaluation for Southeast Asia (FLAMES). Darla K. Munroe, Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. The FLAMES project is developing a process-based statistical framework to model the associations between land use, fire, atmospheric circulation and aerosols in mainland Southeast Asia. It is also constructing an interactive software system to explore and visualize land-aerosol relationships in the region over the past several years. Read more...
- Sustainable Aquaculture Project. Kang-tsung (Karl) Chang, Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Taiwan’s aquaculture faces economic and environmental threats. Once a lead exporter, Taiwan has gradually lost its competitiveness due to globalization since the early 1990s. It is also confronted with acute aquaculture-related environmental problems such as land subsidence and flooding. This project attempts to tackle these challenges and find sustainable alternatives for Taiwan’s aquaculture. Read more...
- The Boston-Area Climate Experiment. Jeffrey Dukes, Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. Read more...
- Refining plant functional classifications for earth system modelling. Sandra Lavorel, Colin Prentice, Sandra Diaz, Paul Leadley. Joint IGBP-DIVERSITAS Fast Track Initiative.
Read more...
- Sustainable resource use or imminent collapse? Climate, livelihoods and production in the Southwest Pacific (CLIP). Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen and the Danish Meteorological Institute. Small island communities in the Pacific Ocean can be generic examples of well-defined systems where population growth, global market forces and climate change all exert pressure on the fragile production systems. Modern technology, simulation modelling and state of the art knowledge will be applied in the study, providing the best tools for understanding the persistence or collapse of civilizations living in confined spaces with limited resources. Read more...
- Rationalising Biodiversity Conservation in Dynamic Ecosystems (RUBICODE). Paula Harrison, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, Centre for the Environment. RUBICODE will review and develop concepts of dynamic ecosystems and the services they provide. Those components of biodiversity which provide specific services to society are being defined and evaluated in order to increase our understanding of the value of biodiversity services and, consequently, of the cost of losing them. This will give decision-makers a more rational basis on which to prioritise conservation strategies and will improve the understanding of the need for adequate conservation policies, which are essential to halting biodiversity loss. RUBICODE is an European Commission Coordination Action Project involving 23 partners. Read more...
- History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE). Kees Klein Goldewijk, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (MNP), Bilthoven, The Netherlands. The History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) presents not only (gridded) time series for the last 300 years of population and land use, but also various other indicators such as GDP, Value Added, Livestock, Private Consumption, GHG emissions, and Industrial production data. Read more...
- Assessing Biodiversity Governance and Management Approaches – The Case of Biosphere Reserves (GoBi). Susanne Stoll-Kleemann, Institute for Geography and Geology, Chair of Sustainability Science and Applied Geography, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, Germany. The basic assumption of the GoBi Research Group which is supported e.g. by the results of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is that to a large degree, significantly reducing the rate of global biodiversity loss depends on managing protected areas. The concrete research gaps which the GoBi Research Group attempts to close surround the problem that although more than 100,000 protected areas cover about 10 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface today, success in protected area biodiversity preservation often leaves much room for improvement. Read more...
- The Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region (SYPR) Project - Landscape Vulnerability-Resilience in the SYPR. Billie L. Turner II, Geography, Clark University, USA. The SYPR project was established in 1997 to examine tropical deforestation and land change in the southern Yucatán (SY) region in which the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve is centered. From its inception, the project had its goal to create an understanding of land dynamics in the SY consistent with the GLP’s science plan. Specific research has ranged from women’s use of NGO green initiatives to soil nutrient dynamics under repeated cultivation to novel land classifications and monitoring to agent-based modeling. Read more...
- Tools for management and Sustainable Use of Natural vegetation in West Africa (SUN). Anne Mette Lykke, Department of Systematic Botany, Aarhus University, Denmark. SUN aims to develop new, practical management tools and concrete management actions for improved sustainable use of natural vegetation by combining scientific vegetation data, remote sensing and socio-economic information with local people’s knowledge and needs. Read more...
- Driving forces and impacts of land use transformation in the Lake Balaton catchment area (Hungary). Peter Szilassi, Department of Geography, University of Szeged. This research project focuses on the the land use and land cover changes and their environmental impact in the Lake Balaton catchment. Lake Balaton is the biggest recreation area in Hungary with international significance. The project aims to join the know-how of three research groups. The GIS Laboratory of the University of Szeged (Hungary) will focus on the development of an historical land cover database that will be based on various spatial datasources such as: historical topographic maps, remote sensing data and orthophoto’s. The Research Group Physical and Regional Geography will focus on the development of land use scenario’s for different timeframes and the assessment of the environmental impact. Detailed soil maps and digital elevation models will be compiled by the Geological Institute of Hungary (MAFI). Read more...
- Post-socialist land-use and land-cover change in the Carpathians. Patrick Hostert, Geomatics Lab, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Eastern Europe has undergone drastic changes in political, societal, and economic structures following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. The shift from centralized command economies to market-oriented systems has altered economic opportunities, induced technological changes, and fostered rapid demographic processes. These changes affected land management and land-use decision making, with an increasing emphasis on economic rather than political influences, and land reforms were carried out to privatize and individualize land-use . Read more...
- Policy Framework for Adaptation Strategies of the Mongolian Rangelands to Climate Change at Multiple Scales (PARCC). Chuluun Togtohyn, Environmental RS/GIS laboratory, National University of Mongolia. Mongolia is in a region that is experiencing the greatest warming on our Earth during the past century. It has warmed by 1.80C since 1940, with the greatest warming occurring during the winter months (approximately a 3.60C increase) and in the spring (approximately 1.80C increase). Annual precipitation has not changed much, but the spring season is becoming drier, causing decreased plant biomass production and later plant onset in some parts of Mongolia. This project builds on a previous climate change vulnerability project in which remote sensing data was collected, and an ecosystem modelling analysis and ground surveys were conducted through the Assessment of Impacts and Adaptation to Climate Change (AIACC) program. Further work will use higher resolution and detailed vulnerability assessment of the rangelands at pilot study sites in order to develop adaptation strategies to climate change in the most vulnerable zones. This will be conducted with the participation of scientists, herders and local land officers. Read more...
- Range Enclosure on the Tibetan Plateau of China: Impacts on Pastoral Livelihoods, Marketing, Livestock Productivity and Rangeland Biodiversity (RETPEC). Grant Davidson, Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen. RETEPC is a 3-year research project investigating the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of policy-driven changes that are transforming China's rangelands in response to a perceived threat of environmental degradation. Having transferred livestock property from state to private ownership over the past two decades, government policy is now encouraging pastoralists to privatise parts of the natural resource, in the form of fenced enclosures. In other areas, the government has asserted its ultimate rights of land ownership and is excluding grazing entirely. These reforms are presented as packages that include incentives for pastoralists to fence pastures, cease moving their animals seasonally, build permanent settlements on the ranges, or emigrate to towns. The RETPEC project will inform public policy by assessing whether land degradation is ameliorated by the new land tenure and grazing regimes. It will also measure the consequences of sedentarisation on pastoralists’ social and economic welfare, when pastoralists are forced to settle in rural areas or are obliged to leave the rangelands altogether and seek scarce alternative livelihoods in towns – creating a rural-to-urban population shift. The overall purpose of this research is to identify the immediate and long-term environmental, social and economic impacts of policies now being put into practice. Read more...
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3Worlds: a multiscale simulation platform for ecology and environmental sciences. Jacques Gignoux, Biogéochimie et écologie des milieux continentaux, Paris, France. This 3-year project (starting January 2008) aims at constructing a modelling platform for the simulation of ecological systems at any spatial and temporal scale. It is based on the idea that ecosystems are complex systems organized in a hierarchy of nested sub-systems. This hierarchical view enables to represent landscapes, ecosystems and individual organisms using a unique set of computer program constructs inherited from recent advances in computer sciences.
- Decision-making and the poverty-environment nexus: analyzing the contextuality of sustainable development at meso-level. Peter Messerli, Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern, Switzerland. This project analyses key indicators of sustainable development, i.e. poverty and land resources,
at sub-national to national scale in Lao PDR, Tanzania, and Pakistan. Spatial patterns of this poverty-environment nexus are then related to a spatially explicit analysis of development interventions and underlying decision-making. Through comparative analysis within and across study sites, a typology of development contexts will be
established in order to identify promising pathways towards sustainable development. Read more...
- Environmental impact of agricultural expansion in southwestern
Amazonia. Carlos Clemente Cerri, Centro de Energia Nuclear na
Agricultura/USP, Brazil. This project considers the global impacts of land
use change in the world’s largest agricultural frontier. The change from forest,
Cerrado and Cerradão (large woody savannah) to highly mechanised agriculture is
happening at unprecedented rates in the Brazilian Amazon, with little
understanding of the consequences for biogeochemical cycles and land
degradation. This research work is based on the hypothesis that agricultural expansion in
southwest Amazonia will have an important environmental impact as it will
significantly increase GHG emissions during deforestation and SOM degradation,
which will outweigh any temporary social and economic benefit to the region. The
aim of the project is to evaluate the environmental impact due to land use and
land use change in southwest Amazonia in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) (CO2, CH4
and N2O) emissions.
- Functional biodiversity effects on ecosystem processes, ecosystem services
and sustainability in the Americas: an interdisciplinary approach (DiverSus).
One of the main ways in which land use change can alter ecosystem functioning and services is by causing shifts in the plant functional biodiversity (i.e. the value, range and relative abundance of plant functional traits present in a given ecosystem, hereafter FB). These alterations modify the ecosystem services perceived by different stakeholders, both locally and remotely. The DiverSus project focuses on the design and implementation of a new interdisciplinary framework to analyze and compare field studies of land use change in the Americas from the tropics to the tundra. Read more...
- Collapse and Restoration of Ecosystem Networks with Human Activity. Norio Yamamura, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan. This project aims to clarify the mechanisms resulting in the collapse and deterioration of ecosystems, and then pave the way to restore and maintain healthier ecosystems by linking sociology, economics and ecology. The study areas are Mongolian grasslands and Malaysia rain forests. Read more...
- Dynamics of Reforestation in Coupled Social-Ecological Systems: Modeling Land-Use Decision Making and Policy Impacts.
Tom P. Evans, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Indiana, USA.
The project explicitly examines human-environment interactions and how macro-scale trajectories of reforestation and deforestation emerge from the actions of heterogeneous household-level decision makers. The project focuses on multiple spatial and temporal scales with analysis at the household and county levels and relying on data from satellite imagery for contemporary analysis and aerial photography for a longer temporal extent. The project has a substantial modeling component that integrates forest dynamics and household decision-making modules within an agent-based framework. We will address the role of land trusts in the process of reforestation in study sites in US and Brazil, and examine the legal mechanisms that exist to facilitate the protection, conservation and development of forest area.
- Tools for Sustainability Impact Assessment: Tools for Environmental, Social and Economic Effects of Multifunctional
Land Use in European Regions (SENSOR). Katharina Helming, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg, Germany.
SENSOR has the objective to develop ex-ante sustainability assessment tools to support decision making on policies related to land use in European regions. Sustainability Impact Assessment seeks to identify possible economic, environmental and social effects of proposed policies and their consequences with respect to sustainable development. Read more...