Hotspots of land use change in Europe

Tobias Kuemmerle,Peter H Verburg,Daniel Müller,Pieter J Verkerk,Julia Stürck,Anette Reenberg,Christian Levers,Stephan Estel,Martin R Jepsen,Christoph Plutzar,Karlheinz Erb

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/6/064020

Abstract

Assessing changes in the extent and management intensity of land use is crucial to understanding land-system dynamics and their environmental and social outcomes. Yet, changes in the spatial patterns of land management intensity, and thus how they might relate to changes in the extent of land uses, remains unclear for many world regions. We compiled and analyzed high-resolution, spatially-explicit land-use change indicators capturing changes in both the extent and management intensity of cropland, grazing land, forests, and urban areas for all of Europe for the period 1990–2006. Based on these indicators, we identified hotspots of change and explored the spatial concordance of area versus intensity changes. We found a clear East–West divide with regard to agriculture, with stronger cropland declines and lower management intensity in the East compared to the West. Yet, these patterns were not uniform and diverging patterns of intensification in areas highly suitable for farming, and disintensification and cropland contraction in more marginal areas emerged. Despite the moderate overall rates of change, many regions in Europe fell into at least one land-use change hotspot during 1990–2006, often related to a spatial reorganization of land use (i.e., co-occurring area decline and intensification or co-occurring area increase and disintensification). Our analyses highlighted the diverse spatial patterns and heterogeneity of land-use changes in Europe, and the importance of jointly considering changes in the extent and management intensity of land use, as well as feedbacks among land-use sectors. Given this spatial differentiation of land-use change, and thus its environmental impacts, spatially-explicit assessments of land-use dynamics are important for context-specific, regionalized land-use policy making.

Highlights

Humankind depends on land use for food, feed, fibre, and bioenergy, yet the environmental trade-offs of land use, such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use and pollution, biodiversity loss or soil erosion, are substantial—from local to global scales (Foley et al 2005, MA 2005, Tilman et al 2011)
At the European scale, these area changes translate into moderate landconversion rates in the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2006, ranging from −13.4% for permanent crops to +6.5% for meadows and pastures, while urban areas expanded by approximately 21%
To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to consistently map changes in the extent of as well as changes in management intensity for cropland, grazing land, forestry, and urban areas at high spatial resolution across all of Europe—thereby highlighting the substantial geographic variation in land-use change processes found in Europe

Summary

Introduction

Humankind depends on land use for food, feed, fibre, and bioenergy, yet the environmental trade-offs of land use, such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use and pollution, biodiversity loss or soil erosion, are substantial—from local to global scales (Foley et al 2005, MA 2005, Tilman et al 2011) As these tradeoffs depend on site conditions and vary substantially in space, understanding where, how, and why land use is changing is important for mitigating them, and for developing policies to transition to more sustainable forms of land management (Turner et al 2007, Rounsevell et al 2012). These examples highlight the importance of jointly analyzing changes in the extent and intensity of land use, but our understanding of how spatial patterns in these land-use change processes relate to each other, or how changes in one sector (e.g., agriculture) relate to changes in another (e.g., forestry, urban areas) remains weak

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