Abstract
Global and regional economic and environmental changes are increasingly influencing local land-use, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, cumulative local land changes are driving global and regional changes in biodiversity and the environment. To understand the causes and consequences of these changes, land change science (LCS) draws on a wide array synthetic and meta-study techniques to generate global and regional knowledge from local case studies of land change. Here, we review the characteristics and applications of synthesis methods in LCS and assess the current state of synthetic research based on a meta-analysis of synthesis studies from 1995 to 2012. Publication of synthesis research is accelerating, with a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated and quantitative methods, including meta-analysis. Detailed trends in synthesis objectives, methods, and land change phenomena and world regions most commonly studied are presented. Significant challenges to successful synthesis research in LCS are also identified, including issues of interpretability and comparability across case-studies and the limits of and biases in the geographic coverage of case studies. Nevertheless, synthesis methods based on local case studies will remain essential for generating systematic global and regional understanding of local land change for the foreseeable future, and multiple opportunities exist to accelerate and enhance the reliability of synthetic LCS research in the future. Demand for global and regional knowledge generation will continue to grow to support adaptation and mitigation policies consistent with both the local realities and regional and global environmental and economic contexts of land change.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10113-014-0626-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The need to adapt to and mitigate global environmental change has increased the demand to harness knowledge production for the needs of policy- and decision-making across global, regional, and local scales (DeFries et al 2012; Turner et al 2013)
This typology will organize the following description of synthesis methods in land change science (LCS), as well as provide the classification scheme for the analysis reported in sections ‘A meta-analysis of synthesis methods in LCS’ and ‘Results.’ Table 1 provides corresponding descriptions, objectives, and examples of each synthesis approach commonly used
Synthesis studies in LCS have rapidly increased over the last decade and will undoubtedly remain essential for generating systematic understanding of local land change processes globally
Summary
The need to adapt to and mitigate global environmental change has increased the demand to harness knowledge production for the needs of policy- and decision-making across global, regional, and local scales (DeFries et al 2012; Turner et al 2013). The production of generalized knowledge of the causes and consequences of local land change and their coupling with global and regional systems remains one of the fundamental challenges of land change science (LCS) (Parker et al 2008; Rindfuss et al 2008; Turner et al 2007). Complex interactions between broad-scale processes and local land-owner and institutional decisions and actions can lead to widely varying outcomes that are often found to be highly context dependent (Parker et al 2008; Rindfuss et al 2004, 2007). Such cross-scale connections, more recently summarized under the term teleconnection (e.g., Liu et al 2013), present substantial challenges for developing a general understanding of local land changes globally
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