Geographical Simulation and Optimization System (GeoSOS)
Global land-use and land cover change (LUCC) data are crucial for various environmental modelling in terms of climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, depletion of water resources and biodiversity loss. So far there are very limited options for using high-resolutions of LUCC products at a global scale. This product, including 4 scenarios based on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), is produced by an innovative approach to simulate global LUCC according to the processes of human-environment interactions.
We integrate the well-known Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE) with a cellular automaton (CA) for simulating multiple land use dynamics at a global scale for 2010-2100. With a spatial resolution of only 30 arc-minutes (about 55 km at the equator), IMAGE have been widely used in the applications of environmental studies. Although a recent study has developed an improved model to simulate global LUCC with 5-min resolution (about 10 km at the equator), these spatial resolutions are generally too coarse for many modelling purposes. Let alone the 55-km resolution, we found that 10-km resolution still has a major distortion of land use pattern as urban land will be underestimated by 19.77% at the global scale. Moreover, the global land change simulation with 10-km resolution will result in the underestimation of 60-97% of urban growth, compared with our proposed 1-km resolution. A large percentage of urban land with small sizes have to merge to other land use classes. During land use change simulation, a majority of small urban clusters is also lost in the IMAGE product, but they can be well preserved in our 1-km product. This 1-km product can thus provide much more spatial details that are crucial for identifying the spatial heterogeneity of land use patterns, and have a general improvement in reducing the uncertainties of global and environmental modeling.
Global land-use and land cover change (LUCC) product at a 1-km resolution for 2010 - 2100 are available to download in: Here
Xia Li, Guangzhao Chen, Xiaoping Liu, Xun Liang, Shaojian Wang, Yimin Chen, Fengsong Pei, Xiaocong Xu. 2017. A new global land-use and land-cover change product at a 1-km resolution for 2010-2100 based on human-environment interactions. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. (PDF Fulltext)
If you have any comments and suggestions, please contact Prof. Xia Li: lixia@geo.ecnu.edu.cn or Prof. Xiaoping Liu: Liuxp3@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Last updated: 28 April, 2017