Abstract
Decadal to centennial land use and land cover change has been consistently singled out as a key element and an important driver of global environmental change, playing an essential role in balancing energy use. Understanding long-term human-environment interactions requires historical reconstruction of past land use and land cover changes. Most of the existing historical reconstructions have insufficient spatial and thematic detail and do not consider various land change types. In this context, this paper explored the possibility of using a cellular automata-Markov model in 90 m × 90 m spatial resolution to reconstruct historical land use in the 1930s in Zhenlai County, China. Then the three-map comparison methodology was employed to assess the predictive accuracy of the transition modeling. The model could produce backward projections by analyzing land use changes in recent decades, assuming that the present land use pattern is dynamically dependent on the historical one. The reconstruction results indicated that in the 1930s most of the study area was occupied by grasslands, followed by wetlands and arable land, while other land categories occupied relatively small areas. Analysis of the three-map comparison illustrated that the major differences among the three maps have less to do with the simulation model and more to do with the inconsistencies among the land categories during the study period. Different information provided by topographic maps and remote sensing images must be recognized.
Highlights
Decadal to centennial land use and land cover change (LUCC) has been consistently singled out as a key element and an important driver of global environmental change [1,2,3,4]
According to the analysis of land use change over the past 60 years using published land cover data based on topographic and environmental background maps and remotely sensed images including Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS) and Thematic Mapper (TM) pertaining to the years 1954, 1976, 2000, and 2005 [42], we get the following basic assumptions of the model: (1) current spatial pattern of land use is dynamically dependent on a historical pattern, and unchanged land cover during 1954–2005 had existed in the 1930s; (2) reclamation of arable land from 1932 to 1954 was derived from grassland; (3) factors for land suitability do not change over time due to data availability
We used the three-map comparison methodology to identify all possible types of prediction successes and errors based on three maps: the observed 1954 land-use map, the observed 1932 land-use map digitized from topographic maps, and the predicted 1932 land-use map
Summary
Decadal to centennial land use and land cover change (LUCC) has been consistently singled out as a key element and an important driver of global environmental change [1,2,3,4]. LUCC could significantly affect key aspects of Earth system functioning [5], playing an essential role in balancing energy use. Ecologists increasingly recognize that a full understanding of ecosystems should be based on the analysis of ecosystem functioning over long time scales [8] as historical land use legacies have a strong and sometimes over-riding influence on the dynamics of present-day ecosystems, exhibiting a time-lagged response. Understanding long-term human-environment interactions is essential to understanding changes in terrestrial ecosystems and this requires historical reconstruction of past land cover changes [9,10].
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