Integrating Analytical Frameworks to Investigate Land-Cover Regime Shifts in Dynamic Landscapes

Jose De Alban,Graham Prescott,Kyaw Latt,Aye Maung,Kevin Woods,Johanness Jamaludin,Cheng Lim,Edward Webb

doi:10.3390/su11041139

Abstract

Regime shifts—rapid long-term transitions between stable states—are well documented in ecology but remain controversial and understudied in land use and land cover change (LUCC). In particular, uncertainty surrounds the prevalence and causes of regime shifts at the landscape level. We studied LUCC dynamics in the Tanintharyi Region (Myanmar), which contains one of the last remaining significant contiguous forest areas in Southeast Asia but was heavily deforested between 1992–2015. By combining remote sensing methods and a literature review of historical processes leading to LUCC, we identified a regime shift from a forest-oriented state to an agricultural-oriented state between 1997–2004. The regime shift was triggered by a confluence of complex political and economic conditions within Myanmar, notably the ceasefires between various ethnic groups and the military government, coupled with its enhanced business relations with Thailand and China. Government policies and foreign direct investment enabling the establishment of large-scale agro-industrial concessions reinforced the new agriculture-oriented regime and prevented reversion to the original forest-dominated regime. Our approach of integrating complementary analytical frameworks to identify and understand land-cover regime shifts can help policymakers to preempt future regime shifts in Tanintharyi, and can be applied to the study of land change in other regions.

Highlights

Escalating human domination of Earth’s ecosystems over the course of the Anthropocene has led to adverse global environmental impacts through changes in climate, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem functions, and biodiversity [1,2,3]
While the analytical framework developed by Ramankutty and Coomes [14] was designed to direct the attention of scientists and researchers to the study of the processes governing land-use regime shifts, the Intensity Analysis framework developed by Aldwaik and Pontius [20] has been applied in the study of the patterns of land cover change, which guides the articulation of the processes driving these changes to gain insights on the dynamics of land change
We investigated the complex dynamics of land-cover regime shifts by integrating complementary analytical frameworks, and applied this to the dynamic and rapidly transitioning landscape of the Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar

Summary

Introduction

Escalating human domination of Earth’s ecosystems over the course of the Anthropocene has led to adverse global environmental impacts through changes in climate, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem functions, and biodiversity [1,2,3]. Transformations in land systems—the terrestrial component of earth systems that comprise all the processes, activities, and socioeconomic outcomes of the human use of land—have profound consequences for local environments and human well-being and are among the most important drivers of global environmental change [5,6]. Land systems can change gradually, the changes may occur abruptly between two stable states in the system. This process is referred to as a regime shift [4,7,8,9], a concept used in ecology to describe rapid transitions between different stable states of ecological systems (e.g., forest to savannah [10,11,12]). Recognition of land-system regime shifts as significant components of land-system change has emerged only recently through local-scale studies with long temporal scales of land use and land cover data (e.g., 27–32 years [8,15]) that have focused on the implications of rapid land-system changes on long-term socio-ecological interactions and human well-being [8,16]

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion