land use

Ecocultural restoration involves the reciprocal repair of ecosystems and revitalization of cultural practices to enhance their mutual resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate change stressors. Resilient ecocultural systems are adapted to retain structure and function in the face of disturbances that remain within historical ranges of severity.

Growing human and ecological costs due to increasing wildfire are an urgent concern in policy and management, particularly given projections of worsening fire conditions under climate change. Thus, understanding the relationship between climatic variation and fire activity is a critically important scientific question.

Developing forest lands and agricultural lands for other uses has wide-ranging implications. Land development can affect production from forest and agricultural lands, wildlife habitat quality, the spread of invasive species, water quality, wildfire control, and infrastructure costs.

Rapid and broad-scale forest mortality associated with recent droughts, rising temperature, and insect outbreaks has been observed over western North America (NA). Climate models project additional future warming and increasing drought and water stress for this region.

Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management.