Biocomplexity: Incubation Activity
Human Actions and
Land-Use/Land Cover Change

Jefferson Fox, Senior Fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
Vinod Mishra, Fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
Ronald R. Rindfuss, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina
Stephen J. Walsh, Professor, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina

We are organizing a workshop in Honolulu (January 3-8, 2002) to address both theoretical and practical issues involved in linking (and collecting) social science data from households and communities with remotely sensed data to study land-use and land-cover change. In the past, researchers have commonly used census-type data that are gathered at the household level, aggregated up to some administrative boundary defined geographically and then linked this aggregated data to land-cover data that were remotely sensed. In recent years, a number of projects have begun to gather social science data at the household level and to link these social science data to remotely sensed data. These projects have been independent of each other and there has not been a careful review of the methods being used to actually link people and pixels (the land parcels they use) as well as the associated challenges and opportunities. This project will bring scientists from these projects together to produce a publication that provides a state-of-the-art survey of methodology and issues for linking social science data from households with remotely sensed data.

This project is designed not only to enhance the knowledge of the scientific community regarding the interaction between human and natural systems, but also to provide decision makers with information and tools to enable them to better understand human impacts on land-use/cover change and to predict environmental responses to such changes. Understanding these processes is critical if policy makers and planners are to create the conditions that promote environmentally sound and sustainable development. More specifically, the proposed workshop will lead to a better understanding of methods of analyzing human impacts on land-use changes and of how these changes influence land cover over time, and will lead to one or more better informed research projects.

The eight invited projects have completed their papers. These papers have been sent to three specialists (remote sensing, social sciences, and ecology) for review. Please click on the underlined links to view the tentative agenda, list of papers, list of disscusants, and a list of questions we asked the authors to respond to.

East-West Center: Ecosystems and Governance