Global land change from 1982 to 2016

Song, Xiao; Hansen, Matthew C.; Stehman, Stephen V.; Potapov, Peter; Tyukavina, Alexandra; Vermote, Éric; Townshend, J. R. G.

doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0411-9

Cited by 1,458 publications

(999 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Deforestation is a global phenomenon, particularly severe in tropical regions (Song et al, ). There, it considerably augments the rate of soil loss, mainly by increasing the soil's vulnerability to erosion (e.g., removal of protective vegetation, degradation of soil structure) and by higher magnitudes of splash, sheet, rill, and gully erosion (Lal, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sediment yield at southwest Ethiopia's forest frontier

et al. 2019

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Deforestation is one of the major factors affecting soil erosion in tropical regions but to what extent does the crop growth in deforested areas protect the land from erosion? We evaluated the effect of deforestation on suspended sediment yield at the scale of zero‐order catchments by contrasting five paired small forest and cropland catchments at Ethiopia's southwestern forest frontier. Suspended sediment samples were collected from nine San Dimas flumes and one V‐notch weir installed in catchments draining the natural forest and cropland, at different altitudes. The suspended sediment data were collected from June 8 to October 30, 2013 and 2014. The suspended sediment yield of both land‐use types was strongly correlated with the corresponding runoff discharge. The results show that the average seasonal suspended sediment yield from cropland (17.0 ± 7.6 Mg ha−1) is four times higher than from the paired forests (4.0 ± 1.9 Mg ha−1). High sediment yields from forests are related to livestock grazing, but forests still have an important role in the protection of the surface soil from erosion at southwest Ethiopia's forest frontier. Land management in southwestern Ethiopia's highlands will need a strong change in paradigm, in which the overall belief in the recently imported mahrasha ard plough is abandoned, oxen and other cattle decreased in number and kept in homesteads, the forests being protected from human and livestock interferences and the open farmlands turned into agroforestry. Such an approach is still possible as all required elements are available in the landscape.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sediment yield at southwest Ethiopia's forest frontier

et al. 2019

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“…We attempted to test the hypothesis that functional elasticity predicts structural state change by comparing this study's global elasticity estimates with observations of land cover change during recent decades (Song et al, ). The two are well correlated at Pearson's r above 0.3 for only 15% ( θ → NEE) and 27% ( P → NEE) of elasticities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The land cover categories of the models badly mismatch and must be approximately cross‐walked between Song et al ’s three‐class scheme and the IGBP classes. The three‐decade period of record in Song et al ( is partially mismatched with the LaThuile dataset and is also rather short compared with the century‐to‐millennia timescales of the typical ecosystem state transition or large scale climate change. Song et al ( describes wholesale qualitative structural land cover transitions whereas most ecosystems including those in the LaThuile dataset in this paper are likely undergoing quantitative, gradual, and partial state transitions especially at decadal timescales.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Three types of land change were available at 0.05° × 0.05° spatial resolution, including the changes of tree canopy (TC) cover, short vegetation (SV) cover, and bare ground (BG) cover (Song et al, ). The direct human control on these three types of land cover change was used to estimate by subtraction the “natural drivers and human‐induced climate change,” which are termed “indirect.” Because we have global models of elasticity to “indirect” climate drivers, the Song et al ( dataset can in principle serve as an independent evaluation of whether functional ecosystem elasticities corroborate with observed ecosystem structural state changes. Pearson's correlation coefficients are calculated between three types of land cover changes due to indirect impact and all functional state elasticities by a total of fourteen IGBP classes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Anticipating global terrestrial ecosystem state change using FLUXNET

Ruddell

Kang

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

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Ecosystems can be characterized as complex systems that traverse a variety of functional and structural states in response to changing bioclimatic forcings. A central challenge of global change biology is the robust empirical description of these states and state transitions. An ecosystem's functional state can be empirically described using Process Networks (PN) that use timeseries observations to determine the strength of process‐level functional couplings between ecosystem components. A globally extensive source of in‐situ observations of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics is the FLUXNET eddy‐covariance network that provides standardized observations of micrometeorology and carbon, water, and energy flux dynamics. We employ the LaThuile FLUXNET synthesis dataset to delineate each month's functional state for 204 sites, yielding the LaThuile PN version 1.0 database that describes the strength of an ecosystem's functional couplings from air temperature and precipitation to carbon fluxes during each site‐month. Then we calculate the elasticity of these couplings to seasonal scale forcings: air temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, and phenophase. Finally, we train artificial neural networks to extrapolate these elasticities from 204 sites to the globe, yielding maps of the estimated functional elasticity of every terrestrial ecosystem's functional states to changing seasonal bioclimatic forcings. These maps provide theoretically novel resource that can be used to anticipate ecological state transitions in response to climate change and to validate process‐based models of ecological change. These elasticity maps show that each ecosystem can be expected to respond uniquely to changing forcings. Tropical forests, hot deserts, savannas, and high elevations are most elastic to climate change, and elasticity of ecosystems to seasonal air temperature is on average an order of magnitude higher than elasticity to other bioclimatic forcings. We also observed a reasonable amount of moderate relationships between functional elasticity and structural state change across different ecosystems.

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“…As a whole region tropical Sub‐Saharan Africa experiences a rapid change in land use from natural (mostly forest type) to agricultural vegetation ( Henry et al., ; FAO , ; Smith et al., ). For example in Tanzania, where our study region is located, a net decrease in the gross area with closed canopy cover of about 28 × 10 3 km 2 has been taken place in the period from 1982 to 2016, whereas in the same period short vegetation and bare ground area increased ( Song et al., ). Reliable data on land‐use change and SOC stocks are of particular interest for countries of Sub‐Saharan Africa, especially in the light of possible future financial mechanisms in relation to reducing climate relevant emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) ( GOFC‐Gold , ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Impact of land use on soil organic carbon stocks in the humid tropics of NE Tanzania

Kirsten

Kimaro

Feger

et al. 2019

J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci.

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The conversion of tropical forests to agricultural land use is considered as a major cause for a decline in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks. However, the extent and impact of different land uses on SOC stock development is highly uncertain, especially for tropical Africa due to a lack of reliable data. Interactions of SOC with the soil mineral phase can modify the susceptibility of SOC to become mineralized. Pedogenic Fe‐, Al‐oxides and clay potentially affect SOC stabilization in highly weathered soils typically found in the humid tropics. The aim of our study was to determine the impact of different land uses on SOC stock on such soils. For that purpose, 10 pedologically similar, deeply weathered acidic soils (Acrisols, Alisols) in the Eastern Usambara Mountains (Amani Nature Reserve, NE Tanzania) under contrasting land use were sampled to a depth of 100 cm. The calculated mean SOC stocks were 17.5 kg C m−2, 16.8 kg C m−2, 16.9 kg C m−2, and 20.0 kg C m−2 for the four forests, two tea plantations, three croplands, and one homegarden, respectively. A significant difference in mean SOC stock of 1.3 kg C m−2 was detected between forest and cropland land use for the 0–10 cm depth increment. No further significant impacts of land use on SOC stocks were observed. All soils have a clearly clay‐dominated texture. They are characterized by high content of pedogenic oxides with 29 to 47 g kg−1 measured for the topsoils and 36 to 65 g kg−1 for the subsoils. No positive significant relationship was found between SOC and clay content. Statistically significant positive relationships existed between oxalate‐extractable Fe, Al, and SOC content for cropland soils only. Compared to data published in literature the SOC stocks determined in our study were generally high independent of the established land use. It appears that efficient SOC stabilization mechanisms are counteracting the higher disturbance regime under agricultural land use in these highly weathered tropical soils.

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Global land change from 1982 to 2016

Cited by 1,458 publications

References 76 publications

Sediment yield at southwest Ethiopia's forest frontier

Sediment yield at southwest Ethiopia's forest frontier

Anticipating global terrestrial ecosystem state change using FLUXNET

Impact of land use on soil organic carbon stocks in the humid tropics of NE Tanzania

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