Latest Research on Land Use: Dec – 2019

Global Consequences of Land Use

Land use has generally been considered an area environmental issue, but it’s becoming a force of worldwide importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the necessity to supply food, fiber, water, and shelter to quite six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and concrete areas have expanded in recent decades, amid large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along side considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet’s resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. [1]

How Accessibility Shapes Land Use

An empirical examination of the residential development patterns illustrates that accessibility and therefore the availability of vacant developable land are often used because the basis of a residential land use model. The author presents an operational definition and suggests a way for determining accessibility patterns within metropolitan areas. this is often a process of distributing forecasted metropolitan population to small areas within the metropolitan region. Although the model presented isn’t yet sufficiently well refined for estimating purposes, the concept and therefore the approach could also be potentially useful tools for metropolitan planning purposes. [2]

Location and land use. Toward a general theory of land rent.

This book develops a general theory of land values and land uses in cities and regions. the idea of rent, which had been explicitly formulated just for agriculture, is extended to the urban case. Earlier studies usually assumed, by simple analogy to agricultural rent theory, that rents and transport costs are complements. this study makes clear that the connection is more complex, involving variations in size of site, tastes, income, profits, and other costs. The author discusses such topics because the location and density of residences and firms, agricultural rent, and therefore the equilibrium structure of land values and land uses in urban and rural regions. [3]

Land use change effects on diversity of soil bacterial, Acidobacterial and fungal communities in wetlands of the Sanjiang Plain, northeastern China

The bacterial, acidobacterial, and fungal communities in wetlands can undergo perturbations by various human activities, like disturbances caused by cultivation and through the method of system restoration. during this study, we investigated the relationships between the composition of the soil bacterial, acidobacterial, and fungal communities and therefore the transformation of wetlands by human activities within the Sanjiang Plain. Soil microbial communities were assessed in wetland soils collected from pristine marsh, neighboring cropland (wetland became arable land), and land that had been reforested with Larix gmelinii. [4]

Geospatial Modeling and Prediction of Land Use/Cover Dynamics in Onitsha Metropolis, Nigeria: A Sub-pixel Approach

Based on a sub-pixel approach, this study analysed the Land Use/Cover (LU/C) dynamics of Onitsha Metropolis in Anambra State, Nigeria. Landsat TM/ETM+ satellite imageries of 1986, 2001 and 2016 were characterized into different LU/Cs using Ridd’s Vegetation, Impervious Surface, Soil and Water (VIS-W) model via Linear Spectral Mixture Analysis (LSMA). LU/C endmember fractions obtained were hardened to supply the ultimate LU/C maps of the study area, per study years considered. Cellular Automata Markov (Ca-Markov) chain and therefore the Land Change Modeler (LCM) were wont to predict future LU/C for the year 2031 and therefore the transition of every LU/C categories between 2016 and 2031, respectively. [5]

Reference

[1] Foley, J.A., DeFries, R., Asner, G.P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S.R., Chapin, F.S., Coe, M.T., Daily, G.C., Gibbs, H.K. and Helkowski, J.H., 2005. Global consequences of land use. science, 309(5734), (Web Link)

[2] Hansen, W.G., 1959. How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of planners, 25(2), (Web Link)

[3] Alonso, W., 1964. Location and land use. Toward a general theory of land rent. Location and land use. Toward a general theory of land rent. (Web Link)

[4] Land use change effects on diversity of soil bacterial, Acidobacterial and fungal communities in wetlands of the Sanjiang Plain, northeastern China
Xin Sui, Rongtao Zhang, Beat Frey, Libin Yang, Mai-He Li & Hongwei Ni
Scientific Reports volume 9, (Web Link)

[5] Onwuka, S. U., Eneche, P. S. U. and Ismail, N. A. (2017) “Geospatial Modeling and Prediction of Land Use/Cover Dynamics in Onitsha Metropolis, Nigeria: A Sub-pixel Approach”, Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology, 22(6), (Web Link)