Abstract
Land use change has impacts upon many natural processes, and is one of the key measures of anthropogenic disturbance on ecosystems. Agricultural land covers 70% of Great Britain's (GB) land surface and annually undergoes disturbance and change through farming practices such as crop rotation, ploughing and the planting and subsequent logging of forestry. It is important to quantify how much of GB's agricultural land undergoes such changes and what those changes are at an annual temporal resolution. Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) data give annual snapshots of agricultural land use at the field level, allowing for high resolution spatiotemporal land use change studies at the national scale. Crucially, not only do the data allow for simple net change studies (total area change of a land use, in a specific areal unit) but also for gross change calculations (summation of all changes to and from a land use), meaning that both gains and losses to and from each land use category can be defined. In this study we analysed IACS data for GB from 2005 to 2013, and quantified gross change for over 90% of the agricultural area in GB for the first time. It was found that gross change totalled 63,500 km2 in GB compared to 20,600 km2 of net change, i.e. the real year-on-year change is, on average, three times larger than net change. This detailed information on nature of land use change allows for increased accuracy in modelling the impact of land use change on ecosystem processes and is directly applicable across EU member states, where collection of such survey data is a requirement. The modelled carbon flux associated with gross land use change was at times >100 Gg C y−1 larger than that based on net land use change for some land use transitions.
Highlights
Spatial polygon data used in this study was made available from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS), a European-wide, annual, spatially explicit dataset at the field level that serves as a register of agricultural subsidy claims under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and is managed in Great Britain (GB) by the separate devolved administrations (DAs) of England, Scotland and Wales
As the IACS data are an annual snap shot of agricultural subsidies claimed in GB, they are a very good indicator of agricultural land use in GB, as the practice in GB is to plant on an annual basis
While a snapshot of land use for a single year is useful for some applications – such as ground-truthing satellite derived data – it does not give information on land use change occurring over time
Summary
Tomlinson et al / Science of the Total Environment 628–629 (2018) 1234–1248 can affect a wide range of activities and functions (Lambin et al, 2001) These include the sequestration and loss of ecosystem soil carbon (C) (Guo and Gifford, 2002), impacts on biodiversity (Pauleit et al, 2005; Newbold et al, 2015), conflicts in land use capability (Pacheco et al, 2014), impacts on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sinks (Adger and Brown, 1994), and local (Chase et al, 2000), global (Feddema et al, 2005) and historical (Hansen et al, 1998) climate change. Land cover can be determined from satellite imagery but the determination of land use (and whether associated GHG fluxes are anthropogenic in nature) requires additional information (Turner II and Meyer, 1998; NOAA, 2015). Both land cover and land use can be encompassed by the term Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC)
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