Abstract
In this chapter, agricultural landscapes are defined as ecosystems used by humans for agricultural purposes (crop/livestock productions). Within the framework of climate land use and land cover evolution, which are sometimes responsible of significant impacts on the environment and societies, represent a major challenge for the international community. Monitoring of agricultural landscapes using remote sensing images takes place within a larger scientific framework on the study of land cover and land use changes in general. The Land Change Science, which has emerged over the last 10years as a full-fledged scientific discipline, aims at understanding land cover and land use dynamics as a complex system based on the humankind-environment relationships, by developing theories, notions and models investigated in the framework of social and environmental sciences. These studies which focused in particular on the analysis of the interactions between land cover changes and global change in general (climate change, loss of biodiversity, impacts on natural resources…), and were developed within the framework of international research programs (LULCC: Land Use and Land Cover Change; GLP: Global Land Project, etc.), have four main objectives:–improving the characterization of the main types of land cover;–improving the identification of space-time dynamics that characterize land cover and land use changes (change dynamics, scales at which they occur, etc.);–identifying the main factors (spatial, biophysical, climatic, socioeconomic, etc.) that motivate land cover and land use changes;–improving and developing new models able to assess the impacts of land use and land cover changes on societies, territories and the environment.
Published Version
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