Abstract
Land cover change (LCC) models are used in many studies of human impacts on the environment, but knowing how well these models predict observed changes in the landscape is a challenge. We used nearly three decades of LCC maps to run several LCC simulations to: (1) determine which parameters associated with drivers of LCC (e.g. roads) get selected for which transition (forest to deforested, regeneration to deforested or deforested to regeneration); (2) investigate how the parameter values vary through time with respect to the different activities (e.g. farming); and (3) quantify the influence of choosing a particular time period for model calibration and validation on the performance of LCC models. We found that deforestation of primary forests tends to occur along roads (included in 95 % of models) and outside protected areas (included in all models), reflecting farming establishment. Regeneration tends to occur far from roads (included in 78 % of the models) and inside protected areas (included in 38 % of the models), reflecting the processes of land abandonment. Our temporal analysis of model parameters revealed a degree of variation through time (e.g. effectiveness of protected areas rose by 73 %, p < 0.001), but for the majority of parameters there was no significant trend. The degree to which model predictions agreed with observed change was heavily dependent on the year used for calibration (p < 0.001). The next generation of LCC models may need to embed trends in parameter values to allow the processes determining LCC to change through time and exert their influence on model predictions.
Highlights
Human induced land cover change (LCC) in the tropics is severely altering landscapes, causing the depletion of many species’ habitat (Gibson et al 2011) and increasing the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere (Baccini et al 2012)
Land cover change (LCC) models are used in many studies of human impacts on the environment, but knowing how well these models predict observed changes in the landscape is a challenge
We used nearly three decades of LCC maps to run several LCC simulations to: (1) determine which parameters associated with drivers of LCC get selected for which transition; (2) investigate how the parameter values vary through time with respect to the different activities; and (3) quantify the influence of choosing a particular time period for model calibration and validation on the performance of LCC models
Summary
Human induced land cover change (LCC) in the tropics is severely altering landscapes, causing the depletion of many species’ habitat (Gibson et al 2011) and increasing the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere (Baccini et al 2012). The majority of people in the municipality are dependent on small-scale agriculture and less than half live in urban areas (Miranda 2012). With such an intense relationship between people and agriculture it is not surprising that this municipality has been undergoing severe deforestation since the settlement was created in 1982. By 1997 it had lost 30 % of its original forest extent (Mangabeira et al 1998), and by 2005 the original landscape had been transformed into a mosaic of remnant forest patches, secondary vegetation, pastures, agriculture lands and small urban areas (Gomes et al 2009). Since the rate of forest loss has declined, and in places even reversed with land abandonment having led to regenerating secondary forest
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