Land Use Science in Action
DISSECTING AND ANALYZING URBANIZATION PATTERNS AT MULTIPLE SCALES
- Rapid urbanization is occurring within secondary cities, particular in Africa, which need more data and analyses to understand how urban change in occurring and its implications.
- Secondary cities provide great socio-economic opportunities, but rapid growth creates challenges for management, sustainable development, and provisioning of resources.
- Multi-tiered approaches are needed to merge the monitoring of broad urbanization patterns with characterizations of heterogenous urban land cover within cities consistently.
- The current era of remote sensing technologies provides opportunities for multi-scale data fusions to analyze urbanization patterns and implications across scales.
Inferential multi-stage multi-model framework to detect vegetation degradation
- Small ruminant and horse density explained 35% of vegetation degradation
- Increasing trends in hotspots of livestock density in the south-central and southeastern regions, whereas medium-density clusters in the northern and northwestern regions of KZ.
- Socioeconomic driver impacts were amplified when interacting with environmental drivers.
- Remote sensing combined with gridded socioeconomic data helps quantify anthropogenic impacts on vegetation degradation
ACTIONS AT DIFFERENT LEVELS ARE NEEDED TO MAKE AQUACULTURE MEET THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS AND ADAPT TO CLIMATE CHAGNES
- Aquaculture farming has expanded from coastal areas to near-coastal brackish-water and inland freshwater areas, and they widely adopts intensive farming technologies for higher yield.
- These cause issues such as increased soil salinization, water consumption and methane emission.
- Satellite remote sensing can provide unique and comprehensive mapping of aquaculture, including aquaculture-related landcover/use changes and aquaculture farming activities.
- Combined with technical and social surveys, the patterns of aquaculture changes can be revealed.
- Stronger actions at the national, regional, and farm levels are needed to regulate aquaculture intensification and expansion to meet the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and adapt to climate changes.
Monitoring urbanization-driven LCLUC hotspots and urban development patterns across Africa
BUILDING ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL INDICATOR 11.3.1. FOR IMPROVED UTILITY AND GUIDANCE
- Urbanization is a leading cause of LCLUC globally, although Africa is currently leading these trends, particularly within small to medium sized, or secondary, cities.
- UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) may contribute to global monitoring of urbanization, but methodological gaps limit the consistent application of SDG Indicators.
- We combined remotes sensing products with open-source software to develop automated approaches for delineating urban areas across broad extents and consistently through time.
- Urbanization-driven LCLUC hotspots were identified and further analyzed across Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Task 4: Analyzing the building energy demand response and corresponding implications for the wider energy system.
- Urban heat islands (UHIs) in growing cities can have varying degrees of impacts on human health, as well as energy demands for cooling.
- Remote sensing and modeling provide essential information for comprehending and managing urbanization's climate and societal impacts.
- By combining gridded data for temperature, building characteristics, population, and behaviour we are able to model the building energy demand response to UHI
- This demand response can then be used to calculate corresponding changes in power supply and related parameters such as emissions.