Land Use and Land Cover Change Analysis at CIPEC

by: Eduardo S. Brondízio, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University

Land use and land cover analysis has a close link to all three major CIPEC questions.

First, it gives spatial and temporal context to the study of household and community level human behavior in relation to forest ecosystems. Most changes in land use perceived at the regional scale are the product of individual, household, and business action. Through land use/cover change analysis, we can reveal the structure of settlement patterns and the links between different agropastoral production systems and the regional landscape.

Second, land use represents the link between human action in relation to the landscape and important bio-geochemical cycles related to globally systemic environmental changes. Land use and cover change analysis is central to our understanding of the role that deforestation and afforestation processes play on the terrestrial biosphere as a source and sink of atmospheric CO2, and may help us to advance towards modeling the links between terrestrial and atmospheric process.

Third, land use and cover change is mediated by institutional (e.g., land tenure arrangement, production structure), economical (e.g., price change, credit availability, market demand), infrastructural (e.g., technology, transportation network), and socio-cultural (e.g., demographics, social organization, cultural background) phenomena. Therefore, by looking at long and short-term rates of change and its spatial distribution, land use analysis provides a way to discriminate the role of different variables and their importance at different scales.

CIPEC's land use and cover change analysis combines approaches from ACT and CIPEC researchers. Examples of land use and cover change analysis at the level of household/farm, community, and global are presented below to illustrate the variety of approaches to address this issue. These examples highlight CIPEC's goal to develop a systematic, long-term study of deforestation and afforestation processes (as mediated by institutions) across a diversity of human societies, while combining initiatives from different research centers and projects at Indiana University. An example of our strength in land use and cover analysis is the recent integration of the Focus 1-Land Use project office from the IGBP - HDP's Land Use and Cover Change Program at Indiana University.

CIPEC's land use analysis combines different approaches depending on the question, scale and level of interest, availability of data, and research expertise. On-going data integration and analysis involves for instance, land use trajectories analysis, dynamic modeling of land use change, statistical modeling, and landscape structure metrics. Data sources and types, processing and arrangement, and integration and analysis are illustrated in the chart to the left. Click on the chart to see the full image.

Community Level

Farm/Household Level	Global Level Land Cover Data

Useful Sites

General

• CIESIN
• IGBP-HDP, Land Use Land Cover Change Program (LUCC)
• FAO
• Global Observation Information Network (GOIN) Project
• JRC-ESA Trees Project

• LBA - The Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia
• NASA Land Cover Land Use Change Program
• UNEP/GRID
• USGS Global Land Information System
• USGS Global land cover characteristics data base

Software Programs

• Erdas IMAGINE
• Fragstats
• Multispec (Purdue/LARS)

408 North Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3799
Phone: (812) 855-2230
TDD: (812) 855-7654
Fax: (812) 855-2634

Last Updated: May 11, 2005
Comments: cipec@indiana.edu 
Copyright 2005, The Trustees of Indiana University.