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Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes

Half of Earth's land surface has been altered by human activities, creating various consequences on the climate and weather systems at local to global scales, which in turn affect a myriad of land surface processes and the adaptation behaviors. This study reviews the status and major knowledge gaps in the interactions of land and atmospheric changes and present 11 grand challenge areas for the scientific research and adaptation community in the coming decade. These land-cover and land-use change (LCLUC)-related areas include 1) impacts on weather and climate, 2) carbon and other biogeochemical cycles, 3) biospheric emissions, 4) the water cycle, 5) agriculture, 6) urbanization, 7) acclimation of biogeochemical processes to climate change, 8) plant migration, 9) land-use projections, 10) model and data uncertainties, and, finally, 11) adaptation strategies. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effects of LCLUC on local to global climate and weather systems, but these putative effects vary greatly in magnitude and even sign across space, time, and scale and thus remain highly uncertain. At the same time, many challenges exist toward improved understanding of the consequences of atmospheric and climate change on land process dynamics and services. Future effort must improve the understanding of the scale-dependent, multifaceted perturbations and feedbacks between land and climate changes in both reality and models. To this end, one critical cross-disciplinary need is to systematically quantify and better understand measurement and model uncertainties. Finally, LCLUC mitigation and adaptation assessments must be strengthened to identify implementation barriers, evaluate and prioritize opportunities, and examine how decisionmaking processes work in specific contexts.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/624354
Date04 1900
CreatorsLiu, Shuguang, Bond-Lamberty, Ben, Boysen, Lena R., Ford, James D., Fox, Andrew, Gallo, Kevin, Hatfield, Jerry, Henebry, Geoffrey M., Huntington, Thomas G., Liu, Zhihua, Loveland, Thomas R., Norby, Richard J., Sohl, Terry, Steiner, Allison L., Yuan, Wenping, Zhang, Zhao, Zhao, Shuqing
ContributorsUniv Arizona, Sch Nat Resources & Environm, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, Maryland, Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, Center for Satellite Applications and Research, National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, College Park, Maryland, National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ames, Iowa, Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota, New England Water Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Augusta, Maine, Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Environmental Sciences Division, and Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
PublisherAMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle
Rights© 2017 American Meteorological Society.
Relationhttp://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/EI-D-16-0012.1

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