Causes and Trajectories of Land-Use/Cover Change

Abstract

One of the key activities of the Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC) project has been to stimulate the syntheses of knowledge of land-use/cover change processes, and in particular to advance understanding of the causes of land change (see Chap. 1). Such efforts have generally followed one of two approaches: broad scale cross-sectional analyses (cross-national statistical comparisons, mainly); and detailed case studies at the local scale. The LUCC project applied a middle path that combines the richness of indepth case studies with the power of generalization gained from larger samples, thus drawing upon the strengths of both approaches. In particular, systematic comparative analyses of published case studies on landuse dynamics have helped to improve our knowledge about causes of land-use change. Principally, two methods exist for comparative analyses of case studies. These methods are sufficiently broad geographically to support generalization, but at a scale fine enough to capture complexity and variability across space and time.