12. Land use Flashcards
What is land cover?
- An indicator
- It shows the physical state of land surface
- Examples: vegation, human structures, other aspects such as physical environment such as soils and water
What is land use?
Land use: the way in which, and the purposes for which, human employ (appropriate) land and its resources.
Provide 2 examples of land cover
- Forests
- Grassland
- Cropland
- Wetland
- Nonbiotic construction
Provide 2 examples of land use
- Logging/forestry
- Ranching
- Agriculture
- Wildlife preservation
- City/town
- Mining
- Conservation
What are biomes?
Biomes are a collection of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat.
What indicator can we use to measure the human influence on the environment?
HANPP: the human appropriation of net primary production
Name 2 drivers of agricultural abandonment.
- Marginality
- Urbanization (rural exodus)
- Unprofitability
- Low-productive systems
What is the passive way to transition a barren land into a forest and what is an active way of doing so?
- Passive: regeneration
- Active: plantation; agroforest
True or false: night time lights are a good correlator for population density.
True
Name 2 drivers of desertification
- Fires
- Agriculture
- Logging
- Climate change
- Overirrigation
Name 2 proximate causes of land cover change.
- Logging and clearing
- Shifting cultivation (or slash and burn)
Name 2 underlying drivers (driving forces) of land cover change.
- Demographic factors: population density
- Economic factors: urbanization
- Technological factors: agro-technical change
- Policy and institutional factors: mismanagement
- Cultural factors: values and beliefs
What are the 3 ways of assessing impacts?
- Literature review: summarizes broad topic, qualitative
- Systemic review: answers a specific question
- Meta-analysis: pulls data from studies to get a statistically result
What is a trade-off?
- A win-lose situation where at least two components in a system compete with each other.
- Trade-offs are often unavoidable and lead to sustainability challenges.
Name the 3 types of distant linkages.
- Teleconnection: environmental interactions between natural systems over distances
- Globalization: socioeconomic interactions between human systems over distances
- Telecoupling: socioeconomic and environmental interactions between coupled human and natural systems over distances
Name two reasons why croplands are traded extensively
- Many regions are not self-sufficient
- Many regions are export-oriented
What the main conclusion from the value chain analysis shown by Pierre?
Only very few companies are responsible for the global transport of crops.
What is the difference between Direct Land Use Change vs Indirect Land Use Change? Use an example.
When a lot of farmers switch to growing energy crops (DLUC), it will trigger a higher demand for food and increased deforestation elsewhere (Indirect Land Use Change).
Indirect Land Use Change can trigger four different effects. What are they?
- Spillover effect: process by which land use changes in one place have impact on land use in another place
- Displacement: if spillover effect happens due to a trade-off between outcomes
- Leakage: if spillover was caused by intervention inland use (e.g. policy, new technology, etc.)
- Rebound effect: demand increases after efficiency gains
