Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) in the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region (SYPR)

Abstract

The southern Yucatan peninsular region (SYPR) project seeks to demonstrate the value of “integrated land-change science” approaches to understanding tropical deforestation and land-use and land-cover change in the region in question. Ecological, social, and remote sensing-GIS sciences are joined in an examination of political economic forces driving land change in this “hot spot” of tropical deforestation, the impacts and feedbacks of these changes on forest and household dynamics, and the ability to advance spatially explicit land-change models of these dynamics linked to TM Landsat imagery. Emphasis here is placed on the methods used to collect and analyze household data in regard to a regional model that addresses both the magnitude and location of deforestation in the region. While exploratory in kind, the effort illustrates the potential to improve land-change models in ways that resonate with the interests of the three research communities involved in the project. The project indicates that integrated land-change science is possible, holds promise to improve understanding across a wide range of research questions, but invariably involves large start-up costs and entertains other requirements that make its practice a long-term research investment.