Land Use Science in Action

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.

New Evidence of Global Carbon Sequestration in Trees Outside of Forests Supports Nature-Based Solutions for Meeting Net Zero Goals.

CRUCIAL ECOSYSTEM SERVICE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AT THE SAME TIME.

• Tree-based sinks are the only actions that remove excess carbon now. 
• TOF at the scale of individual trees underpin livelihoods of billions of people and lead to more stable incomes under climate-stress conditions. 
• NASA earth observations make individual tree carbon measurement counting part of Nature-Based Climate Solutions (NBS); this project mapped every tree in Africa.
• TOF NBS support most international programs, and White House U.S. Net Zero goals.
• Large capital investments are being made in NBS, and TOF solutions increase the relevancy and effectiveness for people’s well being and poverty alleviation.