Development of integrated prognostic models of land use/land cover change: Case studies in Brazil and China

Human beings are transforming significant portions of the earth's land surface, which has been of central concern to the international research community for most of the past century. The conversion of natural forest biomass to agricultural activities plays a significant role in global climate change, while the loss of agricultural land as results of urban sprawl brings more concern about global food security. This dissertation aims to improve the understandings of land use/land cover change (LUCC) dynamics, to investigate activities and factors that control LUCC processes at various scales, and ultimately, to build integrated prognostic models that can provide scientific projections for land use/land cover change as reference to future policy designs in developing countries.; Case studies are carried out in the Brazilian Amazon and the East Region of China. As an agricultural frontier in Brazil, the Amazonia is chosen to be a representative case to study the consequences of agricultural activities on a primarily forested landscape. In contrast, the East Region of China is a rather developed area with a long history of agricultural development. It is selected to be a case for studying the change of agricultural landscape in highly urbanized areas. The State of Rondonia in the Brazilian Amazon and the Shanghai Municipality located in the East Region of China are further studied to account for the spatial variations of land use/land cover change.; Remote sensing technique is applied to measure the magnitude and rate of land use/land cover change, and various modeling method are developed for different modeling purposes and based on data availability. A multinomial logit model of cultivated land use change in the East Region of China shows a declining pace of cultivated land loss that is highly subject to government policy intervention. A principal component regression model is developed to examine how much agricultural land will be taken over by urban sprawl in Shanghai, and how the frontier of urban sprawl is advancing deeper into the far suburb areas. Results of the systematic model of land use/land cover change in the Brazilian Amazon and the State of Rondonia demonstrate an accelerating speed of deforestation in the coming decades. Nearly one third of the standing forest in the Amazonia will be cleared within next twenty years, and more than 70% of primary forest for Rondonia, a frontier state of agricultural development, will disappear from sight.