SP 11: Model-based analysis of regional land-use changes and development of sustainable land-use strategies

During the past years southern Amazonia was facing massive land-use and land-cover changes. In the state of Mato Grosso, the expansion of soybean cultivation and of grazing land has been identified as an important driver for deforestation. Together with future climate change, this dynamics will have consequences on carbon sequestration both in vegetation and soil as well as on the emission of other greenhouse gases related to agricultural activities. Research questions for this sub-project include (1) the development of a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of land-use change within the study region under changing socioeconomic and climate conditions as a basis for the generation of future scenarios of land-use change and (2) the support of the development and the testing of management strategies for the urban and agricultural sectors with respect to the regional carbon balance, the emission of greenhouse gases and landscape functions. For this purpose a new spatially explicit integrated model will be developed and applied that captures the relevant socio-economic and biophysical processes of the regional land-use system. Technological basis for the new model will be the LandSHIFT modelling framework which has been developed at the University of Kassel. It is designed to support the development of regional to global scale spatially explicit land-use system models. Within this framework sub-models from various scientific disciplines such as agronomy and vegetation sciences can be coupled in order to account for feedbacks between the human and environmental aspects of land-use systems. The model will be used for two types of analysis.
(1) First it provides as a tool for visualizing the effects of scenario assumptions on land-use change and their impacts on carbon stocks, greenhouse gas balances and landscape functions.
(2) Second, it will be part of the Carbiocial DSS and will help to support the development and testing of sustainable land-use strategies.

Please see also the Poster of SP 11 presented at the Kick-Off Workshop in Cuiabá, Brazil, 6-9 July 2011

Project Members
PD Dr.-Ing. habil. Rüdiger Schaldach
Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel
Prof. Dr. Joseph Alcamo
Chief Scientist, United Nations Environment Programme, P.O. Box 30552 - 00100, Nairobi, Kenya
PhD Student Christof Schneider
Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel