Land Use Science in Action

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.

Assessing the impact of urban land conversion on local and regional surface climate and its socio-economic consequence

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.

Analyzing the Land-Use Change Impacts of Oil and Gas Exploration Related Infrastructure Changes on Arctic Communities

Remote sensing based mixture modeling to study land and permafrost disturbances

• Rapidly changing environmental conditions in the Arctic, driven by amplified global warming, are impacting communities and ecosystems, particularly due to added anthropogenic impacts from energy exploration and development.
• Analysis integrating remote sensing and socioeconomic data can quantify the land disturbances and help understand societal vulnerabilities of Arctic communities.
• Critical need to quantify impacts resulting from expanding drilling in the region.
• Changes to the Arctic ecosystem provide crucial links to the global climate and biogeochemical cycles.

The global wildland-urban interface

A systematic assessment of global areas of potential direct human-environmental conflict

• The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is where houses and wildland vegetation meet.
• The WUI is an area of human-environmental conflict such as wildfire.
• Our new analysis mapped the WUI globally at 10-m resolution from satellite data.
• The WUI covers 4.7% of the global land and is home to half the global population.
• WUI hotspots on all continents in including the US, Eastern Africa, and South-East Asia.

Field boundary and field size data provide unique measures for agrarian-transition research in smallholder regions in Asia

COMMERCIAL SATELLITE MADE IT POSSILE TO EXTRACT FIELDS IN SMALLHOLDER REGIONS

• Crop field boundary is an essential agricultural variable, and crop field sizes are indicative of the degree of agricultural capital investment, mechanization, and labor intensity.
• Information on delineated field boundaries and field sizes are needed for land use planning, allocation of resources, and agricultural modeling.
• Field extraction is extremely challenging in smallholder regions in Asia and Africa due to small field sizes, irregularly-shaped boundaries, narrow margins, and heterogeneities within and across fields.
• With commercial high-resolution images provided by NASA and new computer-vision algorithms, crop field boundaries are produced in smallholder regions in multiple countries in Asia.
• Agrarian transitions are studied based on characterization of field/farm size changes in multiple Asian countries.