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Developing historic land cover databases The BIOME 300-experience

Developing historic land cover databases The BIOME 300-experience. Prof. Dr. Rik Leemans [ Rik.Leemans@rivm.nl] Dutch Institute of Public Health and the Environment. Land and land use. The traditional use of land in most global carbon-cycle models.

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Developing historic land cover databases The BIOME 300-experience

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  1. Developing historic land cover databasesThe BIOME 300-experience Prof. Dr. Rik Leemans [Rik.Leemans@rivm.nl] Dutch Institute of Public Health and the Environment

  2. Land and land use

  3. The traditional use of land in most global carbon-cycle models • Often initialized by modeled potential vegetation, not actual vegetation • tropical deforestation is the only land-use change considered • Land conversions included but generally no land modifications • Still a missing sink (i.e. the different approaches do not agree on the current global budget)

  4. Improving the carbon cycle • Inter-annual variability is added to the models: the biosphere reacts rapidly • Include realistic patterns of deforestation and reforestation • Add realistic management for forests, pastures and agriculture • Develop a good high-resolution initialization database for the recent past: BIOME 300

  5. Using the current understanding for explaining past and projecting future climate

  6. Why historic land-cover databases? • Testing against historical data is an important step for validating integrated environmental models of global change • The description of historic carbon budgets and land-climate interactions require good initialisation data

  7. An example: HYDE (hundred year database on the environment) Basic Driving Forces Energy & Industry data Terrestrial data Oceanic & Atmospheric data Population, GDP, value added, private consumption, climate data Energy consumption, GHG emissions, industrial production Land use, crop production (area and yield), animal production, food and fertilizer consumption livestock numbers, etc. Concentration of GHGs

  8. The total population numbers per country are scaled down by a factor derived from the historical statistics, and then allocated according the 1994 NCGIA population density map. 1994 World Population Prospects 1950 - 2050, United Nations Population Division, the 1996 Revision. 0.5 degree lat/lon population density map, NCGIA (1995) 1950 International Historical Statistics, B.R. Mitchell (1975 - 1995) & Country Census data & Logistic curves for countries with ‘no data’ or ‘filling the gaps’ e.g. 1800

  9. The total land use estimates per country are derived from historical statistics, and then allocated according to HYDE 2.0 population density maps (proxy for arable area) and a methane emission density map (proxy for pasture) Excel spreadsheets arable area, pasture Export to csv format country1 country 204 year 1700 .…. ..… ….. …... .…. ..… ….. …... .…. ..… ….. …... .…. ..… ….. …... year 1995 .…. ..… ….. …... Fortran routines, allocating areas to IMAGE grid cells Export to ascii matrix, and import in Arc/Info as grid

  10. Arable land and pastures in HYDE

  11. Arable land and pastures in HYDE

  12. Disadvantages of the global backcasting approaches • Coarse scale patterns are captured but locally many discrepancies remain • Non-linearities neglected through the scaling Major challenges: How to improve the regional historic land use and land-cover patterns?

  13. Regional historic reconstructions

  14. Land used in Harvard Forest The mixed natural forest before the settlement of Europeans in 1700

  15. Landuse in Harvard Forest Deforestation of small farms by earlier settlers in 1740

  16. Land use in Harvard Forest Maximum of agraricultural land use in 1830

  17. Land use in Harvard Forest Most farms abandonned in 1850. The new forests are composed of pine

  18. Land use in Harvard Forest Pine forests for wood production on abandonned land in 1910

  19. Land use in Harvard Forest Natural regeneration of mixed broadleafed forests replace the cut pine forests in 1930

  20. Land use in Harvard Forest The currentsituation of Harvard Forest, one of the most researched, relatively young broadleafed forests

  21. Remote sensing approaches

  22. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1970

  23. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1973

  24. Ontbossing in Rondônia in 1976

  25. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1978

  26. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1985

  27. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1988

  28. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1991

  29. Deforestation in Rondônia in 1996

  30. Emperical models of the dynamics of deforestation Period 1988 to 1989 degradation 5294 ha/year Closed forests Regrowth forest deforestation 8634 ha/year Agriculture Period 1986 to 1987 abandonment: 7203 ha/year Degradation: 1543 ha/year Closed bos deforested again 6210 ha/year Regowth forests deforestation: 4112 ha/year Agriculture abandonned: 2902 ha/year deforested again 1973 ha/year

  31. Farms along the TransAmazon Highway in Altamira, Brazil

  32. Deforestation Different drivers in different regions: include the humans dimenison

  33. An example of extreme events An extreme rain event Arable land Grasslands woodland Soil erosion Source: Bork et al., 1998

  34. Conclusions • Natural and socio-economic extreme events are important in defining historical trends • Top-down and bottom-up approaches must be linked to improve the resolution of the global data • The scientific communities on past (PAGES), present (LUCC, BAHC & GCTE) must work together with help of historians • The PAGES HITE initiative is a good start to continue with a BIOME 300 activity

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