Land Change Science in the Tropics: Changing Agricultural Landscapes

The Changing Countryside.- Stasis and Flux in Long-Inhabited Locales: Change in Rural Andean Landscapes.- The Impact of Climate Change on Income Diversification and Food Security in Senegal.- Land-Use Changes and Agricultural Growth in India and Pakistan,1901-2004..- Agricultural Intensification on Brazil’s Amazonian Soybean Frontier.- Coffee Production Intensification and Landscape Change in Colombia, 1970-2002.- Plant Invasions in an Agricultural Frontier: Linking Satellite, Ecological and Household Survey Data.- Shifting Ground Land Competition and Agricultural Change in Northern Cote d’ Ivoire.- Village Settlement, Deforestation, and the Expansion of Agriculture in a Frontier Region: Nang Rong, Thailand.- Market Integration and Market Realities on the Mexican Frontier:The Case of Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico.- Frameworks for Farmland Afforestation in Rural China: An Assessment of Household-based and Collective Management.- Cost-benefit Analysis of Two Models of Agroforestry Systems in Rondônia, Brazil.- Agricultural land-use trajectories in a cocaine source region:Chapare, Bolivia.- The Tobacco Industry in Malawi: A Globalized Driver of Local Land Change.

Andrew Millington is Professor of Geography and Director of Environmental Programs in Geosciences at Texas A&M University. He was previously Chair of the Dept of Geography at Leicester University, has worked at the Universities of Reading and Sierra Leone, and has been Visiting Professor at University College, Dublin and the University of Gent. He has received B.Sc. (Hull University, 1973), M.A. (University of Colorado, 1977) and D. Phil. (University of Sussex, 1985) degrees. He has researched natural resources issues in western Asia, Africa and South America with funding from the European Union, The World Bank and the UK Natural Environmental Research Council. He was formerly Editor of The Geographical Journal and he serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of the AAG and The Geographical Journal.
Wendy Jepson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University. She earned her doctorate from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. Her research focuses on land-use and land-cover change along South America’s modern agricultural frontier, particularly the savannas and dry tropical forests, and the transformation of landscapes in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas. She also examines the relationship between water, society, and equity on the US-Mexico Border. She serves on the editorial board of GeoJournal: An International Journal of Geography

Land use and land-cover change research over the past decade has focused mainly on contemporary primary land-cover conversions in the tropics and sub-tropics, with considerable resources dedicated to the explanation and prediction of tropical deforestation and often ignoring the dynamism in the world’s agro-pastoral landscapes. This collection integrates cutting-edge research in the social, biogeophysical, and geographical information sciences to understand the human and environmental dynamics that change the type, magnitude and location of land uses and land covers in the changing countryside. Our contributors are from across the globe and draw on diverse empirical pan-tropical case studies and disciplinary influences. The research reported examines land-use and land-cover change in Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Malawi, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal and Thailand. Each chapter in this book advances one of three themes: (i) adaptations and change in settled agricultural zones, (ii) agricultural intensification, and (iii) markets and institutions. This book describes the monitoring of land-cover changes, explains the processes through which land is altered, and describes the development of spatially-explicit models to predict land change. This book illustrates how practitioners have integrated knowledge from the three scientific realms - social, biophysical, and GIScience - that underpin land-change science.

Considers various research methodologies and diverse data sources that address challenges posed by land use and land cover changes in agro-pastoral landscapes Presents studies that advance methods in the integration of high-temporal resolution remote sensing with data other platforms, GIScience, landscape ecology, participatory rural appraisal, agricultural statistics, and economic modelling