Land Use Science in Action

Peru’s National-Level armed forces intervention on illegal mining yields positive effects on tropical forest conservation and water quality, but remediation and sustained efforts are needed.

OPERATION MERCURY CURTAILS ILLEGAL MINING IN PROTECTED AREAS TEMPORARILY

• Alluvial gold mining threatens protected conservation and indigenous lands in the tropical Amazon, particularly in Southeastern Peru.
• Federal Military Intervention Actions by the Peruvian government attempted to minimize these activities and move miners to sanctioned mining zones.
• Analyses using remote sensing data can help assess the results of this major policy action.
• NASA’s archival and ongoing data are essential for these conservation policy analyses.
• Peru’s federal policy actions reduced mining in protected areas, shifted mining into buffer unprotected zones, but there is evidence of re-mining activity as enforcement waned.

Integrated multi-tier LCLUC mapping for improved ecosystem services assessment within urbanizing landscapes across African countries

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.

Detection and attribution of dryland vegetation changes to socioenvironmental system drivers in Kazakhstan

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

Comprehensive mapping provide essential measures for actions in aquaculture regarding sustainability and climate change

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.