Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen (IGGUC)
Research group:
IGGUC-LUCC Research Forum
Land Use and Land Cover Change in Africa and SE-Asia, its causes and implications
Anette Reenberg, Dr. Scient., Professor at IGGUC
Torben Birch-Thomsen, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Bo Elberling, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Ole Mertz, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Kjeld Rasmussen, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Michael Schultz Rasmussen, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Inge Sandholt, PhD., associate professor at IGGUC
Martin Rudbeck Jepsen, PhD. student at IGGUC
Thomas Theis Nielsen, associate professor at IGGUC
Christian Tøttrup, PhD. student at IGGUC
Bjarne Fog, Data Manager GIS/ Remote Sensing
Description:
The research programme is made up of a series of research projects anchored at IGGUC. While funded and run as independent entities, the individual projects contribute to a joint institutional effort. They address pertinent issues of methodological as well as theoretical nature that all concern land use and land cover dynamics and their relation to human resource management, landscape structures, biogeochemical cycles and water resources management. The research projects address general aspects such as land use histories, hydrology and land use, vegetation dynamics and diversity in human influenced land use systems, socio-economic and biophysical function of agricultural systems, watershed management, and biogeochemical cycling in land use systems. More specifically, they have the following partial objectives:
to determine the relative importance of factors causing land use changes and NRM strategies in various localities;
to relate land use dynamics to livelihood strategies of contemporary communities and ground these strategies in broader processes of changes of markets, resource scarcity, and social relations;
to investigate changes in carbon storage in vegetation and soils and analyse the way in which they correspond to changes in land-use/landcover associated with agricultural expansion or intensification;
to relate local variations in land use dynamics to their larger scale context (biophysical, cultural, socio-economic, demographic, institutional);
to revise established myths on the population-environment-land use nexus which normally underpin environmental development activities;
to map exploitation of natural resources in order to support environmental policy making;
to develop remote sensing and GIS based methods for national and regional assessment of land use change, primary production and water resources with the aim of contributing to the understanding of water and carbon budgets at all scales and improve resource management.
