Christopher Justice, Department of Geography, University of Maryland , College Park, USA, Garik Gutman, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC, USA
Modeling land cover and land use change in the NASA LCLUC program (assigned to theme
The NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC) Program is part of NASA’s earth science activities, utilizing NASA assets to better understand our changing planet. This NASA LCLUC program also contributes to a broader program of interagency land use and cover change research in the framework of the US Climate Change Science Plan (CCSP). Land use change is one of the most immediate and pervasive forms of global change and NASA satellite observations provide a means to monitor and map change. The LCLUC program is a comparatively new element within the NASA program, it’s goals are to: develop the capability to perform repeated global inventories of land-use and land-cover from space, to develop the scientific understanding and models necessary to simulate the processes taking place, to evaluate the consequences of observed and predicted changes, to further the understanding of the consequences of land-use and land-cover changes on the provision of environmental goods and services, the carbon and water cycles and the management of natural resources, and to improve understanding of human interaction with the environment, and thus provide a scientific foundation for sustainability, vulnerability and resilience of land systems and their use. The program funds competed, research projects with an emphasis on utilizing satellite data. A number of studies are currently funded using satellite data to initiate or validate models. Modeling land use and land cover change is an important aspect of the LCLUC program. This paper provides an overview of the program and the various land use and land cover change modeling projects that are supported.
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(copyright Gunther Maier) |