Mapping global patterns of land use decision-making

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102170Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Numerous studies on land-use decision-making, are limited to local scale case-studies.

  • We study the contextual conditions of local land-use change decision-making globally.

  • The spatial distribution of decision-making can be explained by local spatial contexts.

  • We present global maps of different decision-making modes.

  • Our results can improve global land-use models by accounting for variation in decision-making.

Abstract

Humans have changed most of the terrestrial surface by changing land-use and land-cover. The spatial distribution and extent of land-cover changes have been studied and mapped widely, using remote sensing and geospatial technologies. Although there are numerous studies on the human decisions underlying such changes, they are limited to local case-studies. How such local-scale patterns of decision-making can be used to explain land-use change globally is unknown. Using a collection of local studies from a literature review, we studied the contextual conditions of different modes of land-use change decision-making and present global maps of the potential distribution of decision-making in land-use change. We find that decision-making in land-use can be explained, to a large extent, by the socio-economic, climatic and soil conditions of a location, captured by global data proxies of these conditions. Survival and livelihood objectives are positively associated to the spatial variation in childhood malnutrition and distance to roads, and negatively to total economic output of an area. Economic objectives on the other hand, are positively associated to total economic output, but also to the annual precipitation at the location. Similar trends are observed when looking at more detailed decision-making types: survivalist, subsistence-oriented and market-oriented smallholder decision-making types are more likely found in areas with higher poverty levels and overall lower levels of socio-economic development. The spatial distribution can be used to understand the occurrence of land-use intensification trajectories and to account for variation in decision-making in global land-use models. Finally, we provide a representation of the spread of case-studies and which contexts are poorly represented by case-studies.

Keywords

Livelihoods
Agriculture
Global distribution
Typology

Data availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the SI. The datasets of the maps presented in this paper are available from https://dataverse.nl/dataverse/BETA

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