People are constantly changing the land surface through construction, agriculture, energy production, and other activities. Changes both in how land is used by people (land use) and in the vegetation, rock, buildings, and other physical material that cover the Earth's surface (land cover) can be described and future land change can be projected using land-change models (LCMs). LCMs are a key means for understanding how humans are reshaping the Earth's surface in the past and present, for forecasting future landscape conditions, and for developing policies to manage our use of resources and the environment at scales ranging from an individual parcel of land in a city to vast expanses of forests around the world. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements describes various LCM approaches, suggests guidance for their appropriate application, and makes recommendations to improve the integration of observation strategies into the models. This report provides a summary and evaluation of several modeling approaches, and their theoretical and empirical underpinnings, relative to complex land-change dynamics and processes, and identifies several opportunities for further advancing the science, data, and cyberinfrastructure involved in the LCM enterprise. Because of the numerous models available, the report focuses on describing the categories of approaches used along with selected examples, rather than providing a review of specific models. Additionally, because all modeling approaches have relative strengths and weaknesses, the report compares these relative to different purposes. Advancing Land Change Modeling's recommendations for assessment of future data and research needs will enable model outputs to better assist the science, policy, and decisionsupport communities.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing, and environmental modelling are increasingly being used to address land use and land use management issues although much of the development in these applications is based in specific case studies that are not readily accessible to a wide audience. Spatial Information for Land Use Management is d

This text aims to promote a better understanding of land use and land-cover change in the assessment and management of global environmental resources, and to develop a comparative framework for assessing these changes.

Natural and human-induced changes in Earth's interior, land surface, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans affect all aspects of life. Understanding these changes requires a range of observations acquired from land-, sea-, air-, and space-based platforms. To assist NASA, NOAA, and USGS in developing these tools, the NRC was asked to carry out a "decadal strategy" survey of Earth science and applications from space that would develop the key scientific questions on which to focus Earth and environmental observations in the period 2005-2015 and beyond, and present a prioritized list of space programs, missions, and supporting activities to address these questions. This report presents a vision for the Earth science program; an analysis of the existing Earth Observing System and recommendations to help restore its capabilities; an assessment of and recommendations for new observations and missions for the next decade; an examination of and recommendations for effective application of those observations; and an analysis of how best to sustain that observation and applications system.

Explore the Important Role that the Semantics of Land Use and Land Cover Plays within a Broader Environmental Context Focused on the information semantics of land use and land cover (LULC) and providing a platform for reassessing this field, Land Use and Land Cover Semantics: Principles, Best Practices, and Prospects presents a comprehensive overview of fundamental theories and best practices for applying semantics in LULC. Developed by a team of experts bridging relevant areas related to the subject (LULC studies, ontology, semantic uncertainty, information science, and earth observation), this book encourages effective and critical uses of LULC data and considers practical contexts where LULC semantics can play a vital role. The book includes work on conceptual and technological semantic practices, including but not limited to categorization; the definition of criteria for sets and their members; metadata; documentation for data reuse; ontology logic restrictions; reasoning from text sources; and explicit semantic specifications, ontologies, vocabularies, and design patterns. It also includes use cases from applicable semantics in searches, LULC classification, spatial analysis and visualization, issues of Big Data, knowledge infrastructures and their organization, and integration of bottom-up and top-down approaches to collaboration frameworks and interdisciplinary challenges such as EarthCube. This book: Centers on the link between planning goals, objectives, and policy and land use classification systems Uses examples of maps and databases to draw attention to the problems of semantic integration of land use/cover data Discusses the principles used in a categorization Explores the origins and impacts of semantic variation using the example of land cover Examines how crowd science and human perceptions can be used to improve the quality of land cover datasets, and more Land Use and Land Cover Semantics: Principles, Best Practices, and Prospects offers an up-to-date account of land use/land cover semantics, looks into aspects of semantic data modeling, and discusses current approaches, ongoing developments, and future trends. The book provides guidance to anyone working with land use or land cover data, looking to harmonize categories, repurpose data, or otherwise develop or use LULC datasets.