Projections of land use changes under the plant functional type classification in different SSP-RCP scenarios in China

Abstract

Land use projections are crucial for climate models to forecast the impacts of land use changes on the Earth’s system. However, the spatial resolution of existing global land use projections (e.g., 0.25°×0.25° in the Land-Use Harmonization (LUH2) datasets) is still too coarse to drive regional climate models and assess mitigation effectiveness at regional and local scales. To generate a high-resolution land use product with the newest integrated scenarios of the shared socioeconomic pathways and the representative concentration pathways (SSPs-RCPs) for various regional climate studies in China, here we first conduct land use simulations with a newly developed Future Land Uses Simulation (FLUS) model based on the trajectories of land use demands extracted from the LUH2 datasets. On this basis, a new set of land use projections under the plant functional type (PFT) classification, with a temporal resolution of 5 years and a spatial resolution of 5 km, in eight SSP-RCP scenarios from 2015 to 2100 in China is produced. The results show that differences in land use dynamics under different SSP-RCP scenarios are jointly affected by global assumptions and national policies. Furthermore, with improved spatial resolution, the data produced in this study can sufficiently describe the details of land use distribution and better capture the spatial heterogeneity of different land use types at the regional scale. We highlight that these new land use projections at the PFT level have a strong potential for reducing uncertainty in the simulation of regional climate models with finer spatial resolutions.