Land Change Science in the Tropics: Changing Agricultural Landscapes

The IGBP Land Use Land Cover Change program ended in November 2005 with sessions at the IHDP 6th Open Meeting in Bonn. This book is based on a session at that meeting convened by the editors, and presents other important topics and areas. Included are chapters based on papers presented at this meeting and invited contributions that cover important geographical and thematic issues not addressed at the meeting. In particular, there will be a balance between old agricultural regions (eg. Mediterranean, Indo-Gangetic Plains, Andes, Southern Africa, and upland Southeast Asia) and regions recently converted to agriculture, for example, the Brazilian Cerrado, the Yucatan Penninsula, and Bolivian Chapare. Systematic themes to be explored in this book include the impacts of trade liberalisation, the impacts of narcotics as crops, technological change, new regionally based agricultural organizations, migration impacts on agricultural land use, and agricultural intensification.Land use and land-cover change research over the past decade has focused mainly on contemporary primary land-cover conversions in the tropics and sub-tropics, with considerable resources dedicated to the explanation and prediction of tropical deforestation and often ignoring the dynamism in the world s agro-pastoral landscapes. This collection integrates cutting-edge research in the social, biogeophysical, and geographical information sciences to understand the human and environmental dynamics that change the type, magnitude and location of land uses and land covers in the changing countryside. Our contributors are from across the globe and draw on diverse empirical pan-tropical case studies and disciplinary influences. The research reported examines land-use and land-cover change in Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Côte d Ivoire, India, Malawi, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal and Thailand. Each chapter in this book advances one of three themes: (i) adaptations and change in settled agricultural zones, (ii) agricultural intensification, and (iii) markets and institutions. This book describes the monitoring of land-cover changes, explains the processes through which land is altered, and describes the development of spatially-explicit models to predict land change. This book illustrates how practitioners have integrated knowledge from the three scientific realms - social, biophysical, and GIScience - that underpin land-change science.