Interdisciplinary contributions to spatial and temporal analyses for land cover change.

摘要

Land cover change drives global change through interactions with climate, ecosystem processes, biogeochemical cycles, biodiversity, and human activities. By understanding the linkages between the patterns and causes of land cover change, we can predict possible outcomes and offer alternatives to ameliorate potential negative effects. Methods that link and analyze spatial and temporal patterns of land cover improve the understanding of the complexity and dynamics of land cover change in various geographic locations. I present interdisciplinary methods and accompanying theory from landscape ecology, remote sensing and hydrologic modeling for analyzing impacts and characteristics of the spatial and temporal changes of land cover.;Development of new multiscalar analytical methods to analyze observed patterns captured by remotely sensed data can yield appropriate temporal and spatial scale domains important for the applied study of linking landscape and ecological patterns and processes. The incorporation and scaling of spatial, temporal and spectral information into land cover change analyses and greatly improves the amount of information obtained facilitating linkages between landscape pattern and process. Combining techniques from remote sensing and landscape ecology allows the observation of land cover and the analysis of changing patterns and rates of the spatial structure in northern Bolivia. The combined simulation modeling and statistical analysis to investigate changing discharge contributions to the Rio Grande de Tarcoles an integrated approach to assess the impacts of land cover change within a coupled hydro-climatic system. Despite confounding results of determining whether climate variability or anthropogenic causes created the observed change in river discharge, the combined approach highlights the complexity of the hydro-climatic system and investigates, simultaneously, the various aspects of the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of a complex watershed.;The goal is to combine the strengths of each discipline to form intedisciplinary tenants for spatial-temporal analyses for land cover change. A intedisciplinary approach to land cover change would comprise pattern-process linkages across multiple scales with the spatial analysis of historic regional and global remotely sensed data with the detailed description of ecosystem sub-processes.