Climate effects of global land cover change

Potential climate forcing of land use and land cover change

Pressure on land resources is expected to increase as global population continues to climb and the world becomes more affluent, swelling the demand for food. Changing climate may exert additional pressures on natural lands as present-day productive regions may shift, or soil quality may degrade, and the recent rise in demand for biofuels increases competition with edible crops for arable land. ...

Land Cover, Land Use and the Global Change

Impact of urban land cover change on land surface temperature

The rapid growth in urban population is seen to create a need for the development of more urban infrastructures. In order to meet this need, natural surfaces such as vegetation are been replaced with non-vegetated surfaces such as asphalt and bricks which has the ability to absorb heat and release it later. This change in land cover is seen to increase the land surface temperature. Previous stu...

Radiative forcing of climate by historical land cover change

[1] The radiative effect of changing human land-use patterns on the climate of the past 300 years is discussed through analysis of a series of equilibrium and transient climate simulations using the UVic Earth System Climate Model. Land-surface changes are prescribed through varying land cover type, representing the replacement of natural vegetation by human agricultural systems from 1700 to 19...

Modeled Impact of Anthropogenic Land Cover Change on Climate

Equilibrium experiments with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory’s climate model are used to investigate the impact of anthropogenic land cover change on climate. Regions of altered land cover include large portions of Europe, India, eastern China, and the eastern United States. Smaller areas of change are present in various tropical regions. This study focuses on the impacts of biophysic...