Goals and Background

Introduction and Strategy Overview

Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) is an interdisciplinary scientific theme within NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise (ESE). ESE is NASA's enterprise to study the Earth as an integrated system, emphasizing observations made from the unique perspective of space together with underlying laboratory, field, theoretical, and modeling research. ESE will develop a scientific understanding of the Earth system in response to natural and human induced changes and improve prediction capabilities for climate, weather, global air quality, natural hazards and land use.

The goal of the ESE LCLUC Program is to further the understanding of the consequences of land-cover and land-use change for continued provision of ecological goods and services.

LCLUC will use NASA remote sensing technology to improve understanding of human interaction with the environment, and thus provide a scientific foundation for sustainability, vulnerability and resilience of land systems and their use.

A goal of the ESE LCLUC Program is to further the understanding of the consequences of land-cover and land-use change on environmental goods and services, the carbon and water cycles and the management of natural resources.

The longer-term objective of the LCLUC program is to develop the scientific capability to:

Perform reliable, verifiable and repeated global monitoring of land-cover and land-use processes from space.
Improve the scientific understanding of land-cover and land-use processes from local to global scales.
Model and forecast land-use and land-cover change and their direct and indirect impacts and evaluate the societal consequences of the observed and predicted changes.
Contribute to the establishment of the operational provision of data and information products, services, models and tools for multiple users e.g. scientists, resource managers and policy makers.

LCLUC has been designed initially around a series of regional studies that are complemented by several methodological studies exploring the production and Picture from Emilio Moran's 1999 Significant Results validation of particularl important regional remote sensing datasets. The case studies use a combination of space observations, in situ measurements, process studies and numerical modeling to address a combination of forcing factors of change involving climate, ecological and socioeconomic drivers, the processes of change and the responses and consequences of change. LCLUC recognizes that land use and land cover change involves a series of complex interactions between biophysical and socioeconomic variables. Case studies within LCLUC are structured to strengthen interdisciplinary science, in most cases involving collaborations among ecologists, economists, political scientists, and remote sensing specialists. LCLUC is a truly interdisciplinary research program, forging partnerships between physical and social scientists to address questions critical to our understanding of the Earth system.

The figure below gives examples of these various interactions and an indication of the discipline linkages that need to be developed. To reach the LCLUC objective of developing the capability to perform repeated global inventories and provide the scientific underpinning to improved resource management, it will be necessary to transition the scientific understanding and findings through LCLUC research and development into the operational domain and develop the necessary partnerships with operational agencies and institutions.

LCLUC Program Focus and Goals

The LCLUC Program, through an interdisciplinary approach, is developing and using NASA remote sensing technologies to improve understanding of human interactions with the environment and, thus, provides a scientific foundation for understanding the sustainability, vulnerability and resilience of human land-use and terrestrial ecosystems. The major goal of the program is to further our understanding of the interactions of land-cover and land-use change with the carbon and water cycles, and the climate system, and how these interactions affect ecosystems, biodiversity, environmental goods and services, and the management of natural resources.

The longer-term objectives of the LCLUC program are to develop the capability to perform repeated global inventories of land-use and land-cover from space, and the capability to predict land-use and land-cover changes and their direct and indirect impacts on the Earth’s system and society.

The NASA LCLUC research contributes to the U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative by providing the scientific underpinning for the operational provision of land-use and land-cover data and information products, services, models and tools for multiple users including scientists, resource managers, decision makers and policy makers.

Develop the capability to perform repeated global inventories of land-use and land-cover from space,
Develop the scientific understanding and models necessary to simulate the processes taking place
Evaluate the consequences of observed and predicted changes
Further the understanding of the consequences of land-use and land-cover changes on environmental goods and services, the carbon and water cycles and the management of natural resources
Improve understanding of human interaction with the environment, and thus provide a scientific foundation for sustainability, vulnerability and resilience of land systems and their use.

LCLUC Program Background

The LCLUC program was designed initially around a small number of regional land-use change case studies, complemented by method development and the production and validation of particularly important regional and global remote sensing land-use and land-cover related datasets. The LCLUC program is a component of the NASA Science Focus Area of Carbon, Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems. The program has quickly grown into a multifaceted, interdisciplinary science program, funding diverse research projects and forging partnerships with other NASA Focus Research Areas, such as Water and Energy Cycle, Climate Variability, and other NASA programs, such as Applications, Education and Data Systems, and NASA Missions such as the Earth Observing System (Terra and Aqua), Landsat and New Millennium (EO-1). The LCLUC program has developed strategic partnerships with other agencies such as U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the framework of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). The LCLUC program supports a number of regional initiatives and contributes to key international programs that are fostering international coordination and cooperation on aspects of science and space observations of land-cover and land-use.

Background Information

The LCLUC program has begun with a combination of regional satellite-based studies, representative field-based process and parameterization studies and regional to global inventory and modeling efforts. Strong linkages are being made to existing and planned national and international programs.

In the first phase of the program (1996-2000), the focus was on funding a small number of regional activities in areas where important land-use changes are currently taking place, or have recently taken place, such as the Brazilian Amazon, Mexico, China and Southeast Asia. The emphasis for the second phase these projects have generated new and improved regional data sets; field process and parameterization studies; and improved land use models. A book is being developed by the program to present and synthesize results from the Phase 1 studies and outline the future direction for the program.

In the second phase of the program (2000-2004) LCLUC will focus on the expanding the local process or case studies to the regional scale and synthesizing case study results from different regions; studying the impacts of land use change with emphasis on carbon and hydrological cycles; and predictive modeling of future land use change using process models. The second phase of the program will also form a long-term partnership with NASA’s ACE program to develop the application of LCLUC science to land-use change and land-management issues, especially utilizing satellite data from Landsat 7 and the EOS suite of sensors (e.g., MODIS, MISR and ASTER).

It is part of NASA's goal for the LCLUC program that its projects will include appropriate prototypes for the data Pathfinder-type efforts, i.e. scientifically-driven projects that provide the rationale for assembling and distributing to the scientific community large remote-sensing data sets for analysis. A complete list of Projects and Principal Investigators, with supporting information, can be found on this web-site.