Global Land Use Map Reveals New Insights into Environmental Degradation

Humans use land in different ways. Some land is used for buildings while other land is used for farming. Still other locations are preserved as National parks. Now, though, scientists have created a global map that reveals the impacts of land use. This, in turn, could inform future decisions as to what land should be used for.

Land use changes come in various forms; maize fields replace meadows and grasslands, tropical forests are cleared for pastures and steppes become cropland. The impacts of these changes are immense as animal and plant communities change and ecosystem functions disappear entirely. These alterations can also contribute to climate change as carbon emissions increase. That's why it's important to assess these land use changes across the world.

In this case, the researchers created a world map that identifies twelve global land-use systems, also called archetypes. These include barren lands in the developing world, pastoral systems or extensive cropping systems. In fact, Germany together with most of western Europe, eastern USA and western Australia represents the "intensive cropping system" that covers about five percent of the terrestrial Earth surface.

So how did they create this map? The scientists analyzed data and indicators, taking over 30 factors into account with more than one million data points. This, in turn, revealed novel new insights into land use.

"For example, we didn't know before which regions had an unfulfilled potential for agricultural intensification given the environmental and socio-economic conditions, or in which regions the maximum agricultural yields were already achieved," said Tomas Vaclavik, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If we had analyzed only the environmental indicators, we could not identify where viable opportunities for yield improvements exist."

So what else does this map show? It reveals a different picture of land use than scientists had before. For example, China belongs to five different archetypes.

"It was quite surprising to see that the intensity and type of land use in some regions of China was quite similar to the situation in Western Europe or the United States," said Vaclavik in a news release. "Thus, parts of China, together with particular regions of India and, of course, large areas of Europe, were assigned to the 'intensive cropping systems' archetype."

The new map reveals a little bit more about which regions are experiencing some of the most heavy land use. This, in turn, could inform future decisions with science-based recommendations.

The findings are published in the journal Global Environmental Change.