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GLPNEWS|NOVEMBER2012

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NEWSLETTEROF THE GLOBALLAND PROJECT

GLP - A joint researchagenda of IGBP & IHDP ISSUE N 09 | NOVEMBER 2012

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09 Land Matrix:large-scale landacquisition

PERSPECTIVE

12 Geo-Wiki:accurate dataon land cover

ISSN 2316-3747


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Scientic Steering Committee SSC

Peter Verburg (Chair)Institute for Environmental Studies - VU University AmsterdamDe Boelelaan 1087 - 1081 HV Amsterdam - the NETHERLANDS

Email:[email protected]

Anthony C. Janetos (Vice Chair)

Joint Global Change Research Institute - University of Maryland - USAEmail: [email protected]

Andreas HeinimannCentre for Development and Environment - NCCR North-Southc/o Water Resource and Environment AdministrationPrime Ministers Oce Lanexang Avenue Vientiane - LAO PDR


Dawn C. ParkerUniversity of Waterloo - CANADA

Email: [email protected]

Erle C. Ellis

Department of Geography & Environmental SystemsUniversity of Maryland - USA


Harini NagendraAshoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) - INDIACenter for the Study of Institutions - Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) -Indiana University - USA

Email:[email protected]; [email protected]

Hideaki ShibataField Science Center for Northern Biosphere - Hokkaido University - JAPAN


Jonathan Morgan GroveNorthern Research Station - USDA Forest Service / Baltimore - USA


Karlheinz ErbInstitute for Social Ecology - University of KlagenfurtVienna - AUSTRIA


Lin ZhenInstitute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources Research - Chinese Academyof Sciences - Research Unit for Resource Ecology and Biomass Resources - CHINA

Email:[email protected]; [email protected]

Nancy GolubiewskiLand Use Carbon Analysis System (LUCAS)Ministry for the Environment Manatu Mo Te Taiao / Wellington/ NEW ZEALAND


Neville D. CrossmanCSIRO Ecosystem Sciences - AUSTRALIA


Ole MertzDepartment of Geography and Geology - University of Copenhagen - DENMARK


Patrick H. Hostert

Geomatics Lab, Geography Department - Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin - GERMANYEmail: [email protected]

Sandra LavorelLaboratoire dEcologie Alpine - Universit J. Fourier - FRANCE


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Coverpage

INTER-DISCIPLINARITY,HUMAN-ENVIRONMENTINTERACTIONS and the ALL-SIDEDNESS of MAN

Image: Magno Studio


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Research for Global Sustainability

In writing the editorial of this newsletter, weare pleased to announce the new Future Earth -Research for Global Sustainability initiative. This hasbeen recently launched at a Forum held in Rio deJaneiro, just ahead of the Rio+20 UN Conferenceon Sustainable Development. Future Earth isbeing developed on behalf of a new Science andTechnology Alliance for Global Sustainability,having ICSU as one of its co-sponsors. This newten-years initiative is expected to enhance a moreintegrated and participatory science neededto address all aspects of environmental issuesand to help solving them. Moreover, the Future

Earth will deliver solution-oriented research forsustainability, emphasizing the importance ofinterdisciplinary collaboration, co-design researchwith its beneciaries, improving the science-policyinterfaces, building capacity in developing countriesand engaging a new generation of scientists inglobal change research.

Connected to the development of the FutureEarth initiative, we at the GLP International ProjectOce have been discussing and implementinga couple of improvements aiming at a betterunderstanding and integration of our community.We have recently re-designed our GLPs website

and e-News, specially improved the ways of gettingthe community involved through the network andfacilitating the submission of a project endorsed byGLP.

This issue of the GLP newsletter takes onInterdisciplinary a term that has been gainingattention over our transition to Future Earth. ForGLP, interdisciplinary articulation is in the essenceof our broader eorts to understand changesin the interaction between people and theirenvironments. Providing solutions to the worldsmost pressing global environmental issues willsurely be building from the insights of a much moreintegrated and participatory science. Hence, thisissue introduces a perspective invited article fromDigenes Alves, which talks about methodologicaloptions in interdisciplinary articulation discussingthe limitations of our disciplinary competencesand how society can deal with the tensions andcontradictions of modernity.

Synthesis activities produced under GLP are alsopresented and highlighted in this issue. We herepresent and welcome a contribution for the LandMatrix, an online public database on large-scaleland acquisitions with the purpose of revealing

the global dimensions as well as the emergingpatterns of the phenomenon. Another importantcontribution is the description of Geo-Wiki Project,a global network of volunteers who wish to help

improve the quality of global land cover maps.Still talking about data and visualization issues, we

welcome GEOSHARE as a new endorsed projectunder GLP. GEOSHARE was developed aiming at afreely available, global, spatially explicit databaseon agriculture, land use, and the environmentaccompanied by analysis tools and trainingprograms.

Moreover, this issue presents a couple of eventreports that recently took place across the worldand were connected to GLP. You have here reportsof events from Germany, Russia and United States.One example was the IAMO Forum 2012 entitledLand Use in Transition: Potentials and Solutionsbetween Abandonment and Land Grabbing, whichdiscussed political clarity for stability in land use.

Another important objective of this issue is tointroduce the two new GLP Nodal Oces. SinceApril, the new Taipei Nodal Oce has beenestablished in the National Taiwan University (NTU)with the clear thematic focus on Nature of social-ecological linkages and their implications for theresilience of land systems at various scales. We alsowelcome our new Nodal Oce in Europe, hostedby the European Land-use Institute (ELI) and withthe thematic focus on land management, land useplanning and land use policies.

Finally, we here ocially invite the GLP communityto be engaged in our 2014 GLP Open ScienceMeeting (OSM). The event, hosted by HumboldtUniversity, will take place in Berlin from 19-21March 2014. The 2014 OSM Land transformations:between global challenges and local realities willsynthesize and discuss the role of the land systemas a platform for human-environment interactions,connecting local land use decisions to globalimpacts and responses. The call for sessions is openuntil beginning of January 2013 and we welcomeyour submission under one of the main conferencethemes.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue and welcomeyour deeper engagement in GLP.

Dr. Giovana Espindola

Executive Ocer of the IGBP/IHDPGlobal Land Project (GLP)

EDITORIAL


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Inter-Disciplinarity, Human-Environment Interactions and theAll-Sidedness of ManDiogenes S. Alves

Large-scale land acquisitions in theGlobal South: creating evidence on a

global levelWard Anseeuw; Mathieu Boche; ThomasBreu; Markus Giger; Jann Lay; PeterMesserli; Kerstin Nolte

Geo-Wiki: A tool for crowdsourcingland cover

Steen Fritz; Ian McCallum; Linda See;Christoph Perger; Christian Schill; DmitrySchepaschenko; Franziska Albrecht

GEOSHARE: Geospatial Open SourceHosting of Agriculture, Resource &Environmental Data for Discovery

and Decision MakingThomas Hertel and Nelson Villoria

The Biodiversity Multi-SOurceMonitoring System: From Space ToSpecies (BIO_SOS) project

Harini Nagendra, Palma Blonda, Rob H.G.Jongman

Global forest cover change mappingat Landsat resolution

Saurabh Channan, John Townshend,Joesph Sexton, Chengquan Huang,Min Feng, Jeery Masek, Eric Vermote,

Kathrine Collins, Xiaopeng Song, PraveenNoojipadi, DoHyung Kim, Danxia Song

Post-socialist land use betweenabandonment and land grabbing

Daniel Mller

Overview of multidisciplinaryENVIROMIS conferences

Evgeny Gordov

Spatial land use modeling: simulatingdecisions and their consequences forclimate, carbon, and water

Brian O'Neill, Peter H. Verburg

CONTENTS

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Democracy in the Woods:The Politics of Forest Property Rights

Dr. Prakash Kashwan

New Taipei Nodal Ofce

Prof. YU-Pin Lin

European GLP Nodal Ofce

mission and thematic focus

Christine Frst

New GLP Communicationoutreach channels

Joo de Morais left IGBP/GLPcommunity

2011 IGBP Annual Report published

IHDP Annual Report 2011 was released

IHDP launched the Inclusive WealthReport 2012

Land - A new journal on land science is

launched!

Join the NetworkCall for Contributions - next GLP NewsCall for Announcements in GLP e-Newsand Website

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erspective

Inter-disciplinary articulation can be conceivedfrom dierent points of view. It may distinguish

multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, dependingon the degree of amalgamation of disciplinaryknowledge; it may be understood as problem-oriented or as broad theoretical matter; itfrequently appears as a major challenge in newdomains of research, in particular, when thesocial world is involved with the issues underscrutiny. This essay takes on two key elementsof the land and environmental changes elds- their ecological and social dimensions - tooer a few reections about the nature of theirinter-disciplinary exchanges to contemplate theproblem of how society may respond to these

changes.

Starting with a personal recollection of landchange studies in the Amazon, I frequentlyremember serious inter-disciplinary issues amidthe debates about deforestation causes andeects, and the considerable changes in remotesensing aiming at Earth System research, alwaysexposing the disparity of the methodological,theoretical, and epistemological bases of ourdisciplines (e.g. Costa et al. 2007, Batistella etal. 2008, Schor 2008, and Keller et al. 2009). Atthe same time, the Amazon sometimes can be ahot political topic for which the resources of the

dierent actors signicantly depend on technicaland scientic arguments, a condition that further

amplies the usual tensions and contradictions ofthe scientic eld, and forewarns of unexpectedmethodological and theoretical troubles (e.g.Mack 1990, Mello 2006, Schor 2008).

The broader eld of Global Environmental Change(GEC) - where we nd remarkable programmaticprogress including novel graduate and post-graduate programs, sophisticated means forEarth observation and numerical modeling, andconcertations involving natural and social sciences -is similarly tense and conictual, frequently placingthe scientic eld in the middle of serious political

impasses. It is not unusual, in our eld, to ndquestions about "how to convince the publicthat an interpretation supported by evidencehas more validity", concern whether "politicalactors unduly inuence" environmentalmanagement, and doubts about "the cost-benetof protecting against dierent levels of change".The question about how society may comprehendand respond to GEC has evolved so that it canhardly be formulated in unequivocally denitetechnical terms, as it becomes apparent that, onsuch matters, "one of the reasons why we disagree is because we seek to govern in dierent ways"(Hulme 2009).

INTER-DISCIPLINARITY, HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT

INTERACTIONS and the ALL-SIDEDNESS of MAN

Diogenes S. Alves

Max Weber ([1905] 2004)(approximate translation from the Brazilian 2004 edition, reecting Cohn's([1979] 2003) and Wilding's (2008) interpretations of Weber's work).

National Institute for Space Research (INPE), [email protected]


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Figure 1:Conceptual planes to represent ecological and socialsystems in inter-disciplinary exchanges exploring human-

environment interactions. The representation of ecologicalsystems presuppose an organic kind of structural couplingamong their composing elements; in contrast, in social systems,human agency moves away from organic structural relationshipsassuming that structural changes comprise calculated andunanticipated consequences of social action whereas socialactors are able to make choices and to act.

Human-Environment Interactions

The concept of human-environment interactionsconstitutes perhaps the major collective, unifyingparadigm in the eld of GEC, in the sense that itcombines a general methodological frameworkto piece together disconnected disciplinesstudying environmental change with an implicitposition to present global change to the socialworld - human-induced GEC may signicantlyaect human ecologyand society.

The idea of interactionin itself represents an amplemethodological ground to conceptualize abouthow dierent subsystems interact, even when oursubsystems are studied by disciplines with vastlydiering epistemological and theoretical bases.First of all, this common ground serves to think ofexchanges of energy and matterbetween dierentsubsystems; in quite practical terms, it providesways to collectively explore a variety of attributes- variables, parameters - which may be meaningful

to represent how our dierent subsystemsare interrelated, to plan eld experiments andobserving systems, and most importantly, tooutline the structure of numeric models thatsimulate energy-matter exchanges. Second,the idea of interaction between our systemand its surrounding environment embodies, inour eld, a considerable interest to investigatestructural change, i.e. the kind of change thatmay represent a signicant qualitative change.Assessing qualitative changes is a central issue inGEC studies, and may be conceived from a varietyof theoretical and methodological perspectives,starting, of course, with qualitative changesin the system's physical characteristics. Here,we will consider structural changes in ecologicaland in social systemsto explore a few ideas thatmay orientate our inter-disciplinary interests, at

least in those initial stages of inter-disciplinaryexchanges when we usually look for metaphors,analogies, and diagrams of interconnectionsbetween the objects and categories from ourvarious disciplines.

I propose to think of structural changes in termsof changes in system's identityby attempting toapply to ecological and to social systems the idea

of structural couplingof living systems formulatedby biologist Humberto Maturana (MaturanaRomesin & Dvila Yaez 2009). In our terms,structural couplingin ecological and social systemswould be understood as a relationship betweena system and its surrounding environmentpresupposing that changes in that environmentwould not aect the system's identity - e.g.ecosystem composition, economic, political,social and cultural organization - all throughcontinuing systems reproduction.

Let's quickly go over one possibility of usingstructural coupling as one of the basic elementsof a shared repertoire needed in many of ourinter-disciplinary exchanges. I propose to dothis by creating a pictorial diagram of twoconceptual planes (Figure 1), where structuralcoupling is combined with the concepts ofenergy-matter exchanges and human agency toform two dierent spaces for inter-disciplinaryinteractions concerning, respectively, ecologicaland social systems. Following this conceptual-planemetaphor, we represent ecological systemson a basis formed by the structural couplingand

the energy-matterexchanges axes(Figure 1, right),while social systems are depicted on a secondplane, formed by the structural couplingand thehuman agencyaxes (Figure 1, left).

Social

Syst

ems

Ecological

Systems

Structuralcoupling

Humanagency

Energy-matterexchanges

In ideal, typical inter-disciplinary arrangements,dierent theoretical bases try to compromisewithin the limits of scientic skepticism. Inour eld, inter-disciplinary exchanges seemto be exposed to additional forms of criticismif only because we are talking about human-induced changes that aect humans and society;apparently technical issues related to highuncertainties are combined with aspirations todetermine policy-relevant matters to make thingsmore complicated as both scientists and societyare unavoidably bound by all the sides of thehuman condition.

In this essay we will revisit the concept of human-environment interactions and attempt to depicta place for human agency for some of our inter-disciplinary exchanges. The major motivation forthis exercise is that human agency, as the capacityof people to make choices, to act, may be a vitalelement to contemplate how social systemsmay

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It is crucial to recognize one essential dierencein the spirit of inter-disciplinary interactionsinspiring each of these conceptual planes.In ecological systems, most inter-disciplinaryexchanges presuppose no more than an organickind of structural coupling among a system'scomposing elements. In contrast, givingconsideration to human agency in social systemsmoves away from organicstructural relationshipsand assumes that structural changes in the socialworld comprise calculated and unanticipatedconsequences of social action whereas socialactors are able to make choices and to act. Inaddition, despite the simplied nature of thisexercise and the apparent arbitrariness of theproposed diagram, I suggest that we recognizethat human agency is already an eectual partof important programmatic progresses in oureld, most particularly, in domains focusing oninstitutions, political economy, and equity - evenif not always appearing explicitly.

In summary, I believe that the idea of human-environment interactionstogetherwith structuralchangecan oer a key cross-cutting element forinter-disciplinary exchanges in our eld, providedthat we consider that the very idea of structureis to be conceived dierently in the domains ofecological/physical and social systems. On thepositive side, conceiving of scientic researchin this dual spirit may allow us to respond tothe recurrent preoccupation of positioningenvironmental change next to all the othersides of the human condition by recognizinghuman agency as inalienable from social actionto respond to environmental change. On theother hand, this dual spiritmay also imply a cleardivision of all our inter-disciplinary exchanges intwo separate elds, and thus create a disincentiveto integrate all the sides of the human conditionwithin some universal - maybe, total space forconceptualization. It seems interesting, thus,to end this essay by rapidly reecting aboutthe spirit in which we may undertake inter-disciplinary interactions to face the problems ofenvironmental change.

The All-Sidedness of Man

Max Weber's words in the epigraph may inspireus to scrutinize our ultimate inter-disciplinaryexpectations taking as a starting point thelimitations of our disciplinary competences in theface of that shared acute perception that globalchange will grow more and more signicant asthat "irresistible force", to which Weber makesreference and which seems to determine the livesof all individuals and societies, becomes more and

more global.

Part of the challenges that we have - mostparticularly, those regarding the foundations ofinstitutions, the aspirations of equity, and theoptions of the political economy to face global

change - may be, in fact, inalienable from thatirresistible force, as they may be inseparablefrom the tensions and contradictions ofmodernity. Hence, aspirations to accede to theall-sidedness of man in the face of this forcemay be irremediably opposed by this sensationof renunciation, of resignation, of distancingourselves from "an age of plenitude and beautifulhumanity" which several commentators havefound in Weber and in some of his contemporaries(e.g. Cohn 2003, Zimmerman 1990), and may bepart of the many tensions and contradictions oflater attempts to be part of the modernity project(for Brazil, see Holanda [1936] 1995, and Faoro2007; on a slightly dierent key, Schwarz [1977]2000, and Pamuk 2010).

The weight of this sensation of being forced torenounce to the ideal of "an age of plenitude ofbeautiful humanity" may have critical ontologicaland political dimensions, and deeply inuence

how we conceive the place of scienceto face thetensions and contradictions of modernity. Moreimportantly, the dierences among conceptionsof the place of science may be so huge that itwould be impossible to contemplate the spiritof our inter-disciplinary exchanges withoutconsidering them, as they may imply very distinctoptions to orientate our programs and toposition our theories and ndings before society.These dierences can be quickly illustrated, forexample, by recalling Weber himself, in whichmethodic critic and inescapable renunciationseem inseparable from an acute perceptionabout the diculties of applying purely analyticalconstructions to the empirical world of theautonomous social actor (Cohn [1979] 2003); KarlPopper (1902-1994), for whom our task wouldbe to "provide factual information and a socialtechnology", to "search for, and ght against thegreatest evils of society" (Popper [1945] 1974);John Dewey (1859-1952), for whom our vocationmight be in re-presenting the social to itselfbecause neither the 'public' nor the scientistknows for sure in what sort of experience weare engaged" (Latour 2000); Anthony Giddens

(b. 1938), who dismisses the idea of the scientistinterpreting the meanings of the social worldfor the social actors, whilst these are capable ofselectively and critically absorbing the conceptsproposed by science (Giddens 2001); UlrichBeck (b. 1944), for whom "skepticism [has been]extended to the foundations of scientic workand science [has become] both generalized anddemystied[in society]" (Beck 1992); and Jos deSouza Martins (b. 1938), who suggests that oneof the things that actually we may be able to dois to understand the occasions in which social

conditionand social consciousnessmay nd or maymiss one another" (Martins 2002).

At rst sight, it may appear that this variety ofconceptions would do no more than furtheremphasize that sensation of not acceding to

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total knowledge to the all-sidedness of man andrenouncing of "an age of plenitude and beautifulhumanity". On the other hand, it seems also possibleto conceive of our inter-disciplinary exchanges inanother spirit, in which consideration to the "all-sidedness of man" would not presuppose anycompromise with its actual and ultimate realization;in which, whatever the promises of modernity, itwould be possible to recognize them only in themanifestations of human agency, otherwise thevery events "in which social condition and socialconsciousness may nd or may miss one another".More importantly, such spiritshould not presuppose arenunciationof our aspirations to position our problembefore the social world; rather, it is intended only tosuggest a possible way of reconciliation among ourpresent fragmentary achievements on some broadermethodological ground, so we can nd inspirationto devise novel methodological, theoretical andontological dimensions to realize how society mightcomprehend and respond to global change.

Batistella, M., E.F. Moran & D.S. Alves (Eds.) (2008) Amaznia: Natureza e Sociedade em Transformao,EDUSP, So Paulo

Beck, U. [1986] (1992) Risk Society. Towards a new modernity, SAGE, London

Cohn, G. [1979] (2003) Crtica e Resignao,Martins Fontes, So Paulo.

Costa, W.M., B.K. Becker & D.S. Alves (Eds.) (2007) Dimenses Humanas da Biosfera-Atmosfera naAmaznia,EDUSP, So Paulo

Faoro, R. (2007) A Repblica inacabada,Globo, Rio de Janeiro

Keller, M., M. Bustamante, J. Gash & P.L.S. Dias (Eds.) (2009) Amazonia and Global Change,Geophys.Monogr. Ser., v. 186, AGU, Washington, DC

Giddens, A. (2001) Em defesa da sociologia,Ed UNESP, So Paulo

Holanda, S.B. [1936] (1995) Razes do Brasil,Schwarcz, So Paulo

Hulme, M (2009) Why do we disagree about climate change,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK

Latour, B. (2000) When things strike back: a possible contribution of science studies' to the socialsciences, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 107-123, doi 10.1080/000713100358453

Mack, P. (1990) Viewing the Earth. The social construction of the Landsat satellite system,MIT Press,Cambridge, MA

Martins, J.S. (2002) A sociedade vista do abismo,Vozes, Petrpolis

Maturana Romesin, H. & Dvila Yaez, X. (2009) Habitar humano em seis ensaios de biologia-cultural,Palas Athena, So Paulo

Mello, N. A. (2006) Polticas territoriais na Amaznia,Annablume, So Paulo

Pamuk, O. (2010) The naive and the sentimental novelist,Vintage, New York

Popper, K.R. [1945] (1974) The open society and its enemies,Routledge & Kegan Paul, London

Schor, T. (2008) Cincia e Tecnologia: O caso do Experimento de Grande Escala da Bioesfera-Atmosfera na Amaznia (LBA),Annablume, So Paulo

Schwartz, R. [1977] (2000) Ao vencedor as batatas, Duas Cidades, So Paulo

Weber, M. [1905] (2004) A tica protestante e o esprito do capitalismo,traduo de J.M.M. deMacedo, Schwartcz, So Paulo

Wilding, A. (2008) Max Weber and the `Faustian Universality of Man'. J. Classical Sociol., 8, 67-87, doi10.1177/1468795X07084695

Zimmerman, M.E. (1990) Heidegger's confrontation with modernity: technology, politics, art, IndianaUniversity Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis

References

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The International Land Coalition (ILC), in apartnership with CDE, University of Bern(Switzerland), CIRAD (France), GIGA (Germany),and GIZ (Germany), collected data on large-scale land acquisitions with the aim of revealingthe global dimensions as well as the emerging

patterns of the phenomenon. This was done byreviewing publically available media and researchreports, company websites and accessing directinformation through the partnership network.Cross-referencing of the data was done wherepossible, and each deal was assigned a reliabilitycode. A database containing information onover 2000 land deals was established and areport providing an analysis of the data has beenlaunched in April 2012 (Anseeuw et al, 2012a).

A preliminary data base has been set-up wherepart of the data is publically displayed for review

http://landportal.info/landmatrix The eorts ofthis crowd-sourcing campaign conrm that data ishighly controversial, and often dicult to conrm.The public display of data proved to be eective ingetting numerous feedbacks. In the meantime, the

Ward Anseeuw | MathieuBoche | ThomasBreu | MarkusGiger

JannLay | PeterMesserli | KerstinNolte 1

Large-scale land acquisitions in the Global

South: creating evidence on a global level

database is undergoing an up-date, which involvescorrecting erroneous data, adding new deals andreview of the comments on the beta-version. Inthe future, failed deals and contract farming willbe documented also, but under separate category.

The analyses of cross-referenced data revealedthat the rush for land is real and represents neithera media hype nor a short term reaction to thefood price spikes in 2008/2009 (see also Anseeuwet al , 2012b). In total, reports on interest for landacquisitions lease, concession or sale werereported for an area amounting to a total of morethan 80 Mio ha. Implementation activities havestarted at about one fourth of the land surfacesreported, and one third of the reported dealshave so far actually led to signed contracts. Butour data also shows that many transactions maynot yet be known, other deals were actually never

signed. However, a rst descriptive analysis ofthe information that also made links to nationalstatistics and a number of global spatial data setsallowed revealing a number of emerging patterns(Anseeuw et al, 2012a):

1 Ward Anseeuw: [email protected]. Researcher, CIRAD (Centre de Coopration Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour leDveloppement) & University of Pretoria. Tel +27 829525035

Mathieu Boche: [email protected]. PhD Student, CIRAD (Centre de Coopration Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour leDveloppement). Tl : + 258 826986376

Thomas Breu: [email protected]. Deputy Director CDE, Coordinator NCCR North-South, Executive Director IGS North-South, University ofBern Centre for Development and Environment (CDE).

Markus Giger: [email protected]. Head of Global Change Cluster, University of Bern Centre for Development and Environment (CDE).

Jann Lay: [email protected] . Research fellow at GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. and junior professor at the University ofGttingen- Tel. +49 40 42825763.

Peter Messerli: [email protected]. Director University of Bern Centre for Development and Environment (CDE). Tel +41(0)31 63188 22 / 30 60

Kerstin Nolte: [email protected]. Research fellow at GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. Tel. +49 40 42825542.

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Transnational land acquisitions are highlyconcentrated in Africa. Worldwide 11 countriesaccount for 70% of the reported land dealsurfaces, and 7 of those countries are foundin Africa. Many of the countries concerned arealso aected by a high incidence of hunger andhave economies that are highly dependent onagriculture (gure 1).

The database also identies three categoriesof investor countries, i.e. emerging countries,the Gulf States and the Global North. We alsoobserve a trend to new regionalism such asin South East Asia or Southern Africa, whereinvestors come from within the region (China,Vietnam. South Africa).

Only about one third of the project is focusingpurely on food-production, and the vastmajority of projects is for exports. Investors areseeking exibility to switch between non-food

and food production, especially by using cropssuch as sugarcane, soya and oil palm.

Investors are competing for land with localfarming communities. Approximately 45%of the land deals target cropland or crop-vegetation mosaics. Intensive competition forcropland with local communities is thereforea probability. Even where national indicatorsmay suggest large reserves of suitable land,target locations are often found withincultivated areas and farmland. This analysisthus contradicts the notion that investments

are mostly focused on idle land and serve tobring it into production.

Forested areas are highly aected by landacquisitions. About 24% of the land deals arelocated in forested areas.

Land governance systems are not oftenadequate to deal with large-scale landinvestments. The involvement of foreigninvestors has repercussions on the local landtenure system.

It is common that the prospect of attractingforeign investment may alter the signicanceand role of formal land rights that are oftenheld by state. The analysis of a limited numberof projects where such information wasavailable showed that Governments are in factoften selling or leasing land where smallholdershave customary user rights.

Our research also showed that acquisitionsare rarely based on Free, Prior and InformedConsent (FPIC) and there is limited but worryingevidence on evictions. The evidence from the

Land Matrix reveals that only very few projectsseem to engage in adequate consultations withlocal communities. Rates of compensations areoften very low, and where those are foreseenthey are often still statements of intent.

The project faces obviously a number ofchallenges. From the side of the object ofresearch, information on land deals is oftennot disclosed and not readily available. Alsothe term international acquisitions is not ea-sily dened, and international and domesticinvestors act in partnerships and throughcomplicated legal constructs tracking theorigin of the investment can prove dicult.Contract farming, another important trendin investment in agriculture, falls technicallyoutside the denition of land acquisitionbut can also be confused or linked to landdeals. Lastly, land deals evolve over time,starting possibly by the announcement, andgoing on to publishing of a contract, start ofinvestment and nally to production. Hencethe need for a dierentiated reportingsystem arises.

On the methodological side, the scope of the

research question is global. It is consequentlynecessary to have a methodology whichdoes not aim at complete coverage but atgetting representative data. However adata campaign based on partner networksis subject to many biases, such as unevenstrength of partners network, languagebarriers, uneven government policies ontransparency, as well as dierence in accessto communication and other factors.

Currently the land matrix partnership aimsat overcoming some of the aforementioned

challenges by aggregating the numerousavailable case studies at a global level, byimproving this data through crowd-sourcingtechniques and produce analytical resultsat the global level on a regular basis. Onthe other hand we also aim at producingmore detailed analysis of impacts of landacquisitions through a number of projectsin target countries. An explicit aim is tobetter understand the land acquisitions andtheir impacts by a more detailed look at thecontext in which these investments take

place. Lastly, we also aim at contributingtowards informed-decision making andsupport to policy in view of minimizing risksof LSLA and enhancing possible benets.

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Figure 1: Typology of land acquisitions according to Global Hunger Index 2011 and agricultural GDP.

Note:The size of the bubble represents the share of the total acquired land for each target country.Source:Anseeuw, W. et al. 2012 (based on data from IFPRI 2011 and World Bank 2008).

References

Anseeuw, W.; Boche, M.; Breu, T. ; Giger, M.; Lay, J.; Messerli, P. and K. Nolte. 2012a. The Stateof Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in the Global South. Analytical Report Based on the LandMatrix Database. CDE/CIRAD/GIGA, Bern/Montpellier/Hamburg.

Anseeuw, W., L. Alden Wily, L. Cotula and M. Taylor (2012b), Land Rights and the Rush for Land:Findings of the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project. ILC, Rome.

IFPRI (2011), Global Hunger Index 2011, Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy ResearchInstitute. Available at www.ifpri.org/book-8018/node/8058 (accessed on 10.01.2012).

World Bank, Development Data Group (2008),2008 World Development Indicators, Washington,DC: The World Bank. Available at www.worldbank.org/U0FSM7AQ40 (accessed 10.01.2012).

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Geo-Wiki: A tool for

crowdsourcing land cover

Steen Fritz | Ian McCallum | Linda See | Christoph Perger

Christian Schill | Dmitry Schepaschenko | Franziska Albrecht1

The major global land cover maps (GLC-2000, MODIS and GlobCover) show considerable spatialdisagreement in land cover types when compared with one another, particularly in the forest andcropland domains. Due to the high uncertainty in these products, scientists currently lack accuratedata on land cover, which the Geo-Wiki Project aims to address. In 2009, IIASA, the University ofApplied Sciences in Wiener Neustadt and the University of Freiburg developed a crowdsourcingtool called Geo-Wiki for the visualization, intercomparison and validation of global land covermaps. Using satellite imagery provided by Google Earth, citizens validate global land cover andcontribute to the building of a global calibration and validation data set. Other aims of theGeo-Wiki project include building a more accurate, hybrid land cover map and providing a mapvalidation service for land cover maps currently being developed by the scientic community.

1International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)Schlossplatz 1, Laxenburg, A-2361 Austria; Tel: +43 2236 807

Figure 1: Spatial distribution of data points collected during the rst competition.

The Geo-Wiki project has made a number ofcontributions to scientic research (Fritz et al.,2009; 2011a, b, c; 2012). Geo-Wiki is part of agrowing trend in citizen science, which reversesthe usual top-down ow of data and allowsInternet users from any region in the world tobecome involved in a global land cover validation

exercise. Validation of land cover maps is usually

undertaken by the developers of the productusing a limited sample due to the cost of thisexercise. Public access to high resolution imagerythrough Google Earth provides the opportunity togather vast amounts of validation data in a muchmore cost eective way. Geo-Wiki has alreadycollected more than 100,000 validation samples

using the power of the crowd (Figure 1).

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Competitions have been held in which citizenscientists were incentivized via co-authorship on apublication (Fritz et al., submitted) and other prizesincluding digital cameras and Amazon vouchers(Perger et al., 2012). The current competitiondetails can be found at competition.geo-wiki.org (Figure 2). We run competitions regularly, so

please register on the site and you will receiveinformation about future competitions by email.We are also on facebook, where you can join ourgroup to discover the latest developments.

The quality of crowdsourced data is an ongoingarea of research within the Geo-Wiki project.We are currently developing a set of rules fordetermining condence in user validations aswell as being able to select the most reliablevalidations. These quality control procedures arebased on selected control points determinedby experts. This will be coupled with automatic

procedures for customized training in thoseland cover types where users have the greatestproblems in identifying the land cover.

Crowdsourced data have already been used tovalidate a hybrid cropland map for Africa, whichwas created by combining ve cropland data setsusing a synergy approach (Fritz et al., 2011a).The cropland map, which has an estimatedaccuracy of 83%, is available for download andreview on http://agriculture.geo-wiki.org. We arecurrently developing a global cropland map thatwill combine a much larger set of cropland data

collected during a data sharing workshop (Seeet al., 2011) using an improved methodology.This map is currently being validated usingcrowdsourced data and will be openly availablein autumn 2012.

Figure 2: A screenshot of competition.geo-wiki.org, showing a validation grid and the related menu to collect user input.

Agriculture and competition are only twoof several branches in the Geo-Wiki familyof tools. Biomass.geo-wiki.org and urban.geo-wiki.org are specifically devoted to thevisualization, intercomparison and validation ofbiomass datasets and urban extent (Fritz et al.,2011b, c). Other branches are currently being

developed for validating AusCover (Australianland cover), examining an archaeological siteand a coffee Geo-Wiki as well as a versionof Geo-Wiki that will allow users to createtheir own branch with a minimal amount ofprogramming knowledge.

An alternative to building a customized Geo-Wiki is to use the tool to generate a random aswell as a stratied validation sample so that youcan validate your own maps using Google Earth.This functionality is currently being developedfurther. It is envisaged that this functionality will

become an attractive tool for remote sensing andland-use scientists who are interested in usinghigh resolution images from Google Earth orBing maps (soon to be available as an alternativeto Google Earth images) to validate their owngenerated maps.

Gaming is another area of active investigationin the Geo-Wiki project. The purpose of theProject LandSpotting is to link Geo-Wiki toa series of games as an incentive for vo-lunteers to provide information. A Facebookgame played on Google Earth, which is based

on the popular computer game Civilization,is currently being beta tested and will bereleased during the autumn of 2012. Othergames are currently in development for an iPadand mobile environment.

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Another exciting area of development is Geo-Wikifor mobile applications, specically smartphones.Currently, we have cross-platform applicationswhich allow you to upload your geo-taggedphotos, along with a text label, to the Geo-Wikiwebsite. These photos are immediately availablefor visualization on Google Earth, and can be usedby others to aid in validation.

Geo-Wiki and crowd-sourcing are changing theway that land cover datasets will be generatedand validated in the future. With more accurateinformation of land cover, we will be in a muchbetter position to predict future land use or tounderstand the eects of climate change fromongoing changes to the landscape. Help us toimprove global land cover by participating in ourlatest and future competitions at: competition.geo-wiki.org.

Fritz, S., Mccallum, I., Schill, C., Perger, C., Grillmayer, R., Achard, F., Kraxner, F. and Obersteiner,M. (2009) Geo-Wiki.Org: The use of crowd-sourcing to improve global land cover. RemoteSensing,1 (3), 345-354

Fritz, S., See, L., McCallum, I., Schill, C., Obersteiner, M., van der Velde, M., Boettcher, H.,Havlik, P. and Achard, F. (2011a) Highlighting continued uncertainty in global land covermaps to the user community. Environmental Research Letters,6, 044005.

Fritz, S., Schepaschenko, D., McCallum, I., Perger, C., Schill, C., Obersteiner, M., Baccini, A.,Gallaun, H., Kindermann, G., Kraxner, F., Saatchi, S., Santoro, M., See, L., Schmullius, C. andShividenko, A. (2011b) Observing terrestrial biomass globally: http://Biomass.Geo-wiki.org.AGU Fall Meeting 2011. San Francisco, 5-9 Dec 2011.

Fritz, S., See, L., McCallum, I., Schill, C., Perger, C. and Obersteiner, M. (2011c) Building acrowd-sourcing tool for the validation of urban extent and gridded population. Lecture

Notes in Computer Science, 6783, 39-50.

Fritz S, McCallum I, Schill C, Perger C, See L, Schepaschenko D, van der Velde M, KraxnerF and Obersteiner M 2012 Geo-Wiki: An online platform for improving global land cover.Environmental Modelling and Software31: 110-123.

Fritz S, Van der Velde M, See L, Nalepa R, Perger C, Schill C, McCallum I, Obersteiner M, Cai X,Zhang X, Ortner S, Hazarika R, Cipriani A, Di Bella C, Rabia AH, Garcia A, Vakolyuk M, SinghaK, Beget ME, Erasmi S and Albrecht F (submitted) Downgrading recent estimates of landavailable for biofuel production. Paper submitted to Environmental Science & Technology(August 2012).

Perger C, Fritz S, See L, Schill C, Van der Velde M, McCallum I and Obersteiner M 2012 Acampaign to collect volunteered geographic Information on land cover and human impact.

In: Jekel T, Car A, Strobl J and Griesebner G (Eds.) GI_Forum 2012: Geovizualisation, Societyand Learning.Herbert Wichmann Verlag, VDE VERLAG GMBH, Berlin/Offenbach, pp.83-91.

See, L., Fritz, S., Thornton, P., You, L., Becker-Reshef, I., Justice, C., Leo, O. and Herrero, M.2012. Building a Consolidated Community Global Cropland Map. Earthzine. 24 Jan 2012.

References

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GEOSHARE: Geospatial Open Source Hostingof Agriculture, Resource & Environmental

Data for Discovery and Decision Making

Thomas Hertel | Nelson Villoria 1

GEOSHAREs mission is to develop and maintain a freely available, global, spatially explicit database onagriculture, land use, and the environment accompanied by analysis tools and training programs for newscientists, decision makers, and development practitioners.

GEOSHAREs vision is that of a vibrant global network contributing to this shared infrastructure, enhancing

capacity for analysis in developing countries, and applying these geospatial tools to guide decision makingrelated to food security, land use, environmental sustainability and poverty reduction.

GEOSHARE will achieve its mission and vision by providing a globally consistent, temporally opportune, andlocally relevant database for better decision making; assisting decision makers and researchers by facilitating

access to geospatial data and analysis tools to inform activities relating to agriculture, poverty, land useand the environment; and building capacity in individuals who can eectively bridge disciplines to identifysolutions to resource use and development problems using geo-spatial data and analysis tools.

1I Purdue [email protected]

Feeding 9 billion people in the face of a changingclimate, while preserving the environment andeliminating extreme poverty, is one of the grandchallenges facing the world as we look forwardover the coming decades. Agriculture and landuse change account for roughly a quarter of global

Greenhouse Gas emissionsi; land-based activitiesare arguably the most sensitive to climate change,and farming remains the predominant source ofincome for the worlds poorest households. Yet,the data currently available to understand howglobal and local phenomena aect the agriculture-environment-poverty nexus are insucient toadvance discovery and promote eective decisionmaking.

In a review of state-of-the-art datasets, in responseto a request by the UK Oce of the Chief Scientistin the context of the FORESIGHT study on long

run food security and agricultureiiwe identied awealth of individual data sets on agriculture, butnoted that these tend to be regional or nationalin scope, not compatible with one another, andoften not publicly available or dicult to accessby researchers with limited resources. Whereglobal data sets do exist for specic attributes, forexample, harvested area, yields, and irrigated area,they are not developed in a way that facilitatesinter-operability.

This lack of time series, mutually compatible,geospatial data at global scale has greatly

inhibited the ability of scientists, practitioners andpolicy makers to address the socio-economic and

environmental impacts of contemporary policyissues related to poverty reduction and the longrun sustainability of the world food system. Anaccurate assessment of these policies requiresknowledge of local conditions; however, at thesame time, these local decisions are being made

within an international context, for which globalanalysis is required to capture the drivers ofchange as well as to avoid misleading conclusions.

GEOSHARE aims to ll these data gaps.GEOSHAREs regional partners --- namely, theInternational Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI),particularly through its activities in sub-SaharanAfrica led by Node Director Dr. Stanley Wood; theInternational Rice Research Institute(IRRI, focusingon Asia), led by Node Director Dr. Andrew Nelson;and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture(CIAT), based in Cali, Colombia and focusing its

eorts for this project on Latin America throughNode Director Dr. Glenn Hyman --- have a strongrecord creating both global and local spatialdatasets widely used for discovery and decisionmaking. The data captured by the regional nodeswill enrich the global data provided by the globalresearch nodes which initially include StanfordUniversity (past and future climate) with NodeDirector Dr. Noah Dienbaugh, McGill University(agricultural productivity, land cover and use)with Node Director Dr. Navin Ramankutty,and University of Bonn (irrigation, agriculturalproduction and water use) with Node Director Dr.

Stefan Siebert. The contents of GEOSHARE willbe delivered through a HUBzero-based platform

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(HUBzero.org), making remote processing of data,simulation-based analysis and capacity buildingtools available to any individual with an Internetconnection, anywhere in the world.

GEOSHARE will ensure stakeholders access todata sharing and analysis tools through remotecomputing via HUBzero technology, whichprovides interactive simulation and analysis tools

via a Web browser, requiring no downloading ofdata or software. Through HUBzero, users canshare their expertise by exchanging computerscripts and software ranging from simplespreadsheets to sophisticated simulation modelssuch as Pegasusiii . This activity takes place inthe cloud, powered by Purdue Universitys high-capacity computing grids, without the need forspecialized software or hardware at the usersend.

The GEOSHARE framework is designed to engagea broad, diverse learning community ranging fromdecision makers and seasoned practitioners toundergraduate students and budding scientists.Our overall outreach strategy is to advanceknowledge and catalyze new approaches fordevelopment and resource use through aninnovative cyber-infrastructure coupled withpersonal connections and networking.

GEOSHARE is highly complementary to otherimportant global data infrastructure eortsrelating to land use, food security and sustainability.The most obvious complementarities are withsimilar eorts currently underway at regionalscale such as the Gates Foundation-funded

HarvestChoice initiative led by IFPRI and theUniversity of Minnesota. Another important typeof complementarity is that oered by existingglobal data base infrastructure projects oeringrelated, and sometimes overlapping, data sets.For example, the data on soil fertility generatedby the GlobalSoilMap.net project can be linked toGEOSHARE allowing users to match these soilsdata with other relevant information archived inGEOSHARE. Similarly the CMIP archive of climatemodel results will provide an important source ofinformation on historic and future climate.

The United Nations Food and AgricultureOrganization (FAO) is the worlds leading sourceof globally comparable, national scale data onagriculture, land and water use. GEOSHARE willdraw on these FAO resources in evaluating itsaggregated geospatial data. And, of course,GEOSHARE will follow the guidelines and protocolsestablished by Global Earth Observations (GEO)and the associated system of geospatial databases (GEOSS) which will provide an importantlink to the broader global, geospatial community.It will also collaborate closely with the sub-groupsworking on agriculture, including the agriculturalmapping subtask being led by the InternationalInstitute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA)iv.GEOSHARE will also benet from recent initiativesto invest in agricultural monitoring across thedeveloping world, as discussed by Sachs et alv.

and currently under implementation through ona recent grant from the Gates Foundation.

GEOSHARE will also be a source of input data forother biophysical and economic modeling eortssuch as the Agricultural Model Inter-comparisonand Improvement Project (AgMIP). In particular,global data on current yields will be critical as theAgMIP team seeks to scale up its results fromindividual sites to the entire world. In addition,GEOSHARE will be helpful when it comes toscaling up results from the current round ofagricultural monitoring projects.

References

i http://www.wri.org/chart/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2005

ii Hertel, T., W. Britz, N. Dienbaugh, N. Ramankutty, N. Villoria, (With additional contributions from S.Wood, S. Siebert, G. Hyman, and A. Nelson), 2010. A Global, Spatially Explicit, Open-Source, Data Base forAnalysis of Agriculture, Forestry, and the Environment: Proposal and Institutional Considerations.Avail-able at http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/foresight/.

iii Deryng, D., W.J. Sacks, C.C.Barford, and N. Ramankutty, 2011. Simulating the eects of climate and agri-cultural management practices on global crop yield. Global Biogeochemical Cycles,25(GB2006), 18 pp.

iv See, L., Fritz, S., Thornton, P., You, L., Becker-Reshef, I., Justice, C., Leo, O. and Herrero, M. (2012). Buildinga Consolidated Community Global Cropland Map.Earthzine. 24 Jan 2012.

v Sachs, J., R. Remans, S. Smukler, L. Winowiecki, S.J. Andelman, K.G. Cassma, D. Castle, R. DeFries, G. Den-ning, J. Fanzo, L.E. Jackson, R. Leemans, J. Lehmann, J.C. Milder, S. Naeem, G. Nziguheba, C.A. Palm, P.L. Pinga-li, J.P. Reganold, D.D. Richter, S.J. Scherr, J. Sircely, C. Sullivan, T.P. Tomich, and P.A. Sanchez, 2010. Monitoringthe Worlds Agriculture. Nature, 2010. 466(7306): p. 558560.

vi www.agmip.org/

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Harini Nagendra | Palma Blonda |Rob H.G. Jongman1

The Biodiversity Multi-SOurce Monitoring System:From Space To Species (BIO_SOS) project

The Biodiversity Multi-SOurce Monitoring System: From Space To Species (BIO_SOS) project (http://www.biosos.wur.nl/UK/) is developing an Earth Observation Data for Habitat Modelling (EODHaM) system toutilize remote sensing data for monitoring protected areas, working in sites as diverse as the Mediterranean,

the Netherlands, Wales, Brazil and India. A knowledge-based, deductive learning classication schemegenerates land cover maps from satellite data multi-season imagery, based on global decision rules and site-specic contextual features. Through a translation dictionary and a semantic net framework (drawing on

ancillary and contextual data) one-to-many mapping of land cover classes to habitat classes is conducted. Thisis followed by the automated extraction of biodiversity indicators such as landscape connectivity, ecosystem

robustness and species distributions, and anthropic pressure indicators, from spatial data. Such an approachwill greatly assist scenario building to improve protected area management, and contributes to GLP Theme 1

on the Dynamics of Land Systems, and Theme 2 on the Consequences of Land System Change.

1Harini Nagendra, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Royal Enclave, Srirampura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore 560064, India.Tel: +91 80 23636555; Fax: +91 80 23530070; Email: [email protected]

Palma Blonda,National Research Council - Institute of intelligent systems for automation (CNR-ISSIA), 14 Via G. Amendola 122, 70126, Bari, Italy.Email: [email protected]

Rob H.G. Jongman, Alterra, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Postbus 47, 6700AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands.Email: [email protected]

BIO_SOS is the abbreviation of BiodiversityMulti-SOurce Monitoring System: From SpaceTo Species. This medium-size, collabora tive,multi-institution, interdisciplinary EuropeanUnion Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)funded project aims to deve lop tools and modelsto utilize remote sensing data for consistent,

multi-annual monitoring of protected areasand their surroundings, in sites as diverse asthe Mediterranean, the Netherlands, Wales,Brazil and India BIO_SOS seeks to develop anEarth Observation Data for Habitat Monitoring(EODHaM) system. This involves an initial two-stage, knowledge-based, deductive learningclassication scheme for both land cover andhabitat mapping from satellite data, followed bya third stage, devoted to automated extractionof biodiversity indicators and pressure indicators.Ontologies and semantic networks are used toformally represent expert knowledge, and allow

automatic inferences that provide guidance toimage analysis and interpretation.

An important element in the BIO_ SOS projectis that it builds on habitats as basic units forbiodiversity observation through the denitionof General Habitat Categories (GHCs), as hasbeen developed in a predecessor project EBONE(http://www.ebone.wur.nl/UK/). This approachhas signicant potential to become a globalharmonized system for the translation of landcover classication to habitat classication. The

Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) LandCover Classication System (FAO-LCCS) hasbeen identied as the classication scheme thatappears the most useful for both harmonizingdierent Land Cover classication systems, andtranslating Land Cover maps to General HabitatCategories (GHCs), from which Annex I Habitats

can be dened.

The EODHaM 1st stage utilizes spectral data toprovide robust classication of FAO LCCS classesat Levels 1 and 2 (Lucas et al., 2012 a), relying onmulti-temporal and multi-sensor data, primarilyfrom very high resolution (e.g. QuickBird, IKONOS,GeoEye, WorldView-2) imagery but also from highresolution (e.g. IRS, Landsat) imagery (Nagendraet al., 2011). Images from dierent seasons havebeen found very useful to characterise land coverclasses, particularly vegetation with markedphenologies. While we nd hyperspectral data to

be benecial for land cover classication, they areoften expensive and logistically complex, whereasequivalent information can often be provided bymulti-season very high resolution imagery (Lucaset al., 2012 b).

The EODHaM 2nd stage provides a moredetailed classication of land covers, based ona hierarchical application of crisp decision rulesto dierentiate land cover classes at LCCS Level3 and beyond, drawing on context-sensitivefeatures for class discrimination (e.g. relating tolife form, cultivation practices, physical status

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and surface aspect), incorporating ancillary and in-eld data collected according to dened protocolsand accuracy standards (Honrado et al., 2011;Baraldi et al., 2011). These approaches have beentested in Italy, Wales and the Netherlands, withfuzzication of certain rules now being explored.

Discrepancies between LCCS and GHC denitions(e.g. vegetation height and canopy coveragecutos) have been resolved in a LCCS-to-GHCtranslation dictionary (Tomaselli et al., 2011). Asemantic net framework has been developed totranslate maps from LCCS to GHCs (Kosmidouet al., 2011). This utilizes ancillary data andcontextual information to resolve ambiguitiesarising from one-to-many mappings of land coverclasses to habitat categories, through site-specicrules such as adjacency rules and elevation/sloperules. In subsequent stages, fusion of dierentinformation methods is being introduced to takedata uncertainty into consideration.

A further goal of BIO_SOS is the extraction ofindicators for monitoring anthropic pressuresfrom spatial data. A hierarchical system has beendeveloped to identify and monitor anthropicimpacts on land cover/habitats, communitiesand species, from multiple-time land cover andhabitat changes (Nagendra et al., 2012). A reviewof state of the art approaches from literaturehas identied analytical methods for pressuremapping at the rst and second levels of detail inthis hierarchical framework. This information willbe used for scenario building for the productionand quantication of indicators and expectedtrends in anthropic pressure.

State of the art approaches have also beenidentied for the quantication of landscapestructural pattern and evaluation of landscapeconnectivity (Mairota et al., 2011). In an Italiansite, these approaches have been used to developsite-specic and scale-specic composite indices,as baseline indicators for monitoring biodiversitychange (Mairota et al., 2012). Approaches are beingdeveloped to evaluate the internal robustnessand external susceptibility of ecosystems basedon the relationship between vegetation habitatsand soil connectivity and erosion. Species specicecological modelling tools such as Ecological Niche

Modelling are also being used in sites to guidethreat identication and impact quantication(Bonardi et al., 2011).

While BIO_SOSs area of emphasis is in less-studied NATURA 2000 sites in the Mediterranean,the project also covers sites in the Netherlands,Wales, Brazil and India (Dimopoulos et al., 2011),thus contributing to GLP interests of relatingland cover change to modications in habitats

and biodiversity, and monitoring of protectedarea-embedded landscapes. Most applicationshave so far been developed and tested on sitesin Italy, the Netherlands, and Wales. BIO_SOS isnow setting the next step by testing whetherthere are dierences between habitat types andregions, by applying these approaches to otherKey Biodiversity Areas in Brazil and India.

In India, the two test sites are located in theWestern Ghats biodiversity hotspot. The BiligiriRangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary lies inbetween the Eastern and Western Ghats regionand is highly biodiverse, with 1400 species of

higher plants (Figure 1). The area surrounding thepark is densely populated, with a high dependenceon forests for fuel and fodder. We have access tolong term vegetation monitoring data collectedfor over a decade, providing an invaluable basefor the study of human impacts on land coverchange and biodiversity. The Netravali WildlifeSanctuary is situated in the Central Western Ghatsregion, also with very high biodiversity and speciesendemicity, but with very little documentationfor this site, despite anthropogenic pressuresincluding agriculture and mining. Invasive plantspecies Lantana camaraand Chromolaena odoratarepresent major threats to biological integrity inboth landscapes (Figure 2). In India, the BIO_SOSproject in India will assess the applicability ofthe approaches and algorithms developed forEurope to map land cover classes, evaluate howthese can be related to GHCs in the Indian tropicalforest context (with signicantly greater speciesdiversity and land cover and habitat heterogeneitycompared to the other Mediterranean andnorthern European test sites), and seek to mapthe spatial distribution of plant species andpressure, with a specic focus on invasive speciesdistributions.

Figure 1:Invasive species Lantana camara dominates the vegetation in some parts of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills Wildlife Sanctuary,taller than a humans height in many places. Photograph credits: Madhura Niphadkar.

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References

Figure 2:Vegetation type map of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills Wildlife Sanctuary in India, overlaid with a proposedsampling grid for collection of in-situ information on invasive species. Figure credits: Madhura Niphadkar.

(Note: BIO_SOS Deliverables can be accessed at http://www.biosos.wur.nl/UK/Deliverables+and+Publications/).

Baraldi, A., Lucas, R., Blonda, P., Tomaselli, V., Tarantino, C., Lovergine, F., Mairota, P., Mucher, S., Honrado, J.P., Bogers, M.,Dimopoulos, P., Torri, D., Labadessa, R., Nagendra, H., Niphadkar, M., 2011. Protocols for new on-site campaigns. BIO_SOSDeliverable D4.3.

Bonardi, A., Dimopoulos, P., Ficetola, F., Kallimanis, A.S., Labadessa, R., Mairota, P., Padoa-Schippoa, E., 2011. Selected bio-indicators. BIO_SOS Deliverable D6.6.

Dimopoulos, P., Kallimanis, A., Honrado, J.P., Mucher, C.A., Lucas, R., Mairota, P., Tomaselli, V., Terzi, M., 2011. Sites Description.BIO_SOSDeliverable D2.2.

Honrado, J.P., Alonso, J., Castro, P., Martins, L., Pas, I., Gonalves, J., Guerra, C., Marcos, B., 2011. The BIO_SOS metadatageoportal and the external quality of pre-existing datasets. BIO_SOSDeliverable D4.5.

Kosmidou, V., Petrou, Z., Lucas, R.M., Tomaselli, V., Petrou, M., Bunce, R.G.H., Bogers, M.M.B., Mucher, S., Tarantino, C.,Blonda, P., Baraldi, A., 2011. Software for habitat maps production from LC. BIO_SOSDeliverable D6.10.

Lucas, R., OConnor, B., Inglada, J., Mcher, S., Roupioz, L., Arvor, D., Tomaselli, V., Kosmidou, V., Niphadkar, M., Nagendra, H.,Adamo, M., Tarantino, C., Carito, S., Biagi, B., Lovergine, F., Blonda, P., 2012 a. Report on Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingSystem (RS_IUS) 1st Stage Module. BIO_SOSDeliverable D5.3.

Lucas, R., OConnor, B., Inglada, J., Mcher, S., Roupioz, L., Nagendra, H., Adamo, M., Tarantino, C., Carito, S., Blonda, P., 2012b. Hyperspectral remote sensing. BIO_SOSDeliverable D5.4.

Mairota, P., Nagendra, H., Kosmidou, V., 2011. Preliminary report on landscape pattern analysis: State of the art. BIO_SOSDeliverable 6.2.

Mairota, P., Cafarelli, B., Boccaccio, L., Leronni, V., Labadessa, R., Kosmidou, V., Nagendra, H., 2012. Using landscape structureto develop quantitative baselines for protected area monitoring. Ecological IndicatorsDOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2012.08.017

Nagendra, H., Lucas, R., Blonda, P., Baraldi, A., Honrado, J.P., Jongman, R., 2012. Report on criteria for selection of suitableEO datasets and identication of EO datasets with adequate range of spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions for each site.BIO_SOSDeliverable D4.4.

Nagendra, H., Mairota, P., Blonda, P., Marangi, C., Torri, D., Lucas, R., Dimopolous, P., Honrado, J.P., Niphadkar, M., Tomaselli,V., 2012. Developing a methodology to identify locally recognizable pressures and quantify their impact on habitats. BIO_SOSDeliverable D6.8.

Tomaselli, V., Blonda, P., Marangi, C., Lovergine, F., Baraldi, A., Mairota, P., Terzi, M., Mcher, S., 2011. Report on relationsbetween vegetation types derived from land cover maps and habitats. BIO_SOSDeliverable D6.1.

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Saurabh Channan | John Townshend | Joesph Sexton | Chengquan Huang

Min Feng | Jeery Masek | Eric Vermote | Kathrine Collins | Xiaopeng Song

Praveen Noojipadi | DoHyung Kim | Danxia Song1

The Global Forest Cover Change project is a multi-year activity designed to generate forest cover and forest cover changeproducts at multiple resolutions and multiple dates for every land surface in the world. The GFCC team is located at theUniversity of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This activity is sponsored primarily through the NASAMEaSUREs program, with its emphasis on producing quality data products called Earth Science Data Records (ESDRs). UsingLandsat Global Land Survey (GLS) for the 30 meter products and MODIS for the VCF products, the following ESDRs will begenerated and made available:

Global ne resolution (< 100 m) surface reectance ESDR for four epochs centered around 1975, 1990, 2000, and 2005;

Fine resolution (< 100 m) forest cover change (FCC) ESDR between the four epochs;

Fragmentation products derived from the ne resolution FCC products; Global 250-m vegetation continuous eld (VCF) based FCC ESDR from 2000 to 2005;

FCC ESDR products aggregated from the ne resolution and the 250 m FCC products to 250 m, 500 m, 1 km, and 0.05grids for use by carbon, biogeochemical and hydrological modelers;

Subsets of the above products for protected areas of the world and their buer zones.

1Global Land Cover Facility, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of MarylandURL www.landcover.org. Email: [email protected]

Global forest cover changemapping at Landsat resolution

Changes in forest cover impact the globalcarbon cycle, the hydrologic cycle, biodiversity,

and are critical to understanding the causesand consequences of land use change. The

goal of this project is to produce a global forestcover change map at Landsat resolution from

1975 2005 using Global Land Survey Landsatdatasets.

Figure 1:In the background is the hazy top of atmosphere (TOA) map, which after being processed by LEDAPS corrects the atmospheric noise producingsurface reectance data. This dataset is currently available for download at the Global Land Cover Facility (www.landcover.org)

Forest cover change products have previouslybeen generated at regional and national scales.Skole and Tucker (1993), Tucker and Townshend

(2000), Steininger et al. (2001), Zhang et al.(2005), and Huang et al. (2007a) are some of

the few studies that executed wall-to-wallchange detection at national scales. DeFrieset al. (2002) calculated global tropical forest

change based on AVHRR data along with regionalrates of change estimated from Landsat data.

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Figure 2: Leveraging automated classication, TDA SVM, the forest coverchange map above was produced using Landsat GLS2000 and GLS2005.

Although the last two studies involved use ofselected Landsat imagery and products, theywere not used to carry out wall-to-wall changemapping for the entire study area. As part ofthe Millennium Assessment, a synthesis of localand regional products was generated indicatingthe distribution of the main areas deforested,

but was inadequate for quantitative estimates ofchange. The United Nations Food and Agriculture

Organization (FAO) Forest Resource Assessment

(FRA) carried out limited Landsat-based sampling

of change detection to assist the estimation of

global tropical forest change rates for 1990-

2000 (FAO, 2001). Relying on national inputs and

sampled remotely sensed data, this assessment

provides inadequate quantitative information on

the distribution of change by country for many

reasons.

The Earth Science Data Records (ESDR) of Global

Forest Cover Change project is funded to createglobal forest cover change (FCC) ESDR products

at ne (< 100 m) and moderate spatial resolutions.

Requirements for such products are specied in

many documents, including the ESDR Community

White Paper on Land Cover/Land Change(Masek et

al., 2006a) and the Global Observations of Forest

Cover/Land-Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Fine

Resolution design documents (Skole et al., 1998;

Townshend et al., 2004). The ne resolution

ESDR products will be produced using NASAsglobal Landsat data sets, which are called the

Global Land Survey (GLS) and which are availablefor 1975, 1990, 2000, (Tucker et al., 2004),

and 2005 epochs. Landsat-class resolutions

are essential for land cover change detectionbecause of the ne scale of such changes,

especially those resulting from anthropogenicfactors. A substantial proportion of the variability

of change has been shown to occur at resolutions

below 250m. Further information describing the

approach and lessons learned of this project

are available on a paper published on Globalcharacterization and monitoring of forest cover

using Landsat data: opportunities and challenges(Townshend, et al., 2012).

These ESDRs of GFCC will provide the rst and

only consistent, global record of forest coverchanges documenting the past 30 years andenable the rst comprehensive assessmentsof Earths forest cover at a scale appropriateto anthropogenic changes. It will also providethe basis for understanding impacts of forestchange on the Earth system, including carbonand hydrological cycles. In addition, the ne

resolution and global extent of the fragmentationproducts will support habitat analyses and otherecological studies at scales ranging from localto global, which will be particularly valuableto natural resources managers responsible formanaging carbon (Ojima & Galvin, 1994; DeFrieset al., 1999), protecting watersheds (Band, 1993;Sahin & Hall, 1996; Bounoua et al., 2002), andconserving biodiversity (Dudley et al., 2005; Milla& Markku, 2005). The protected-area subsets ofthe forest change and fragmentation records willallow assessment of protected area eectivenessand the broader eectiveness of internationalenvironmental and biodiversity agreements.Completion of this project will satisfy keycomponents of the GOFC-GOLD requirementsfor ne-resolution products (Skole et al., 1997;Townshend et al., 2004).

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Daniel Mller1

The IAMO Forum 2012 was entitled Land Use in Transition: Potentials and Solutions betweenAbandonment and Land Grabbing and took place from June 20 to 22, 2012, in Halle (Saale),Germany. The Forum provided a platform to present and discuss cutting-edge research about mainprocesses and future prospects of land use in transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Former

Soviet Union, and East Asia. Over 180 participants from science and policy engaged in discussions infour plenary and 20 parallel sessions. The event was hosted by the Leibniz Institute of AgriculturalDevelopment in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO) in collaboration with the Humboldt-Universitt

zu Berlin and the SILVIS Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from the GermanResearch Foundation (DFG) and the Ministry of Science and Economic Aairs Saxony-Anhalt.

1 Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO)and Geography Department, Humboldt-Universitt zu BerlinPostal: Theodor-Lieser-Str. 2, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany | E-mail: [email protected]

Post-socialist land use betweenabandonment and land grabbing

The IAMO Forum kicked o with a plenarysession on Land Use Transitions with a talk byPeter Verburg, chair of the GLP and professorat the Institute for Environmental Studies, VUUniversity Amsterdam. Verburg pointed out thatnot only dramatic but also subtle and gradualchanges in land use had a decisive impact on foodproduction and global environmental changes.Verburgcriticized that research and politics almostexclusively concentrated on large-scale changes

and drew generalised conclusions based onglobal analyses, often with few references to localcontexts. However, land-use decisions and policymeasures are made in coordination with local landusers, natural site conditions and socio-economicenvirons. Verburg opined that sustainabledevelopment requires intensive collaboration ofvarious academic disciplines and restructuring indisciplinary organisation of academia and incentiveinitiatives.Helmut Haberl, associate professor at the Instituteof Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria-UniversittKlagenfurt, discussed key aspects in sustainablebioenergy production. He pointed out that climate

change and nite availability of fossil energiesmade transition to more sustainable and climate-friendly energy systems inevitable. Intensicationof biomass usage to generate energy, as substituteof fossil fuels, has considerable potentials but alsotriggers a marked increase in land consumption andthus large-scale changes in cultivated landscapes.Haberl stated that the potential contribution ofbiomass towards more sustainable energy systemsis much smaller and often more problematic for theenvironment than assumed to date. Achievementof highest possible eciency from biomass in theform of cascading use and prevention of negativeenvironmental impacts requires spatially explicit

analyses and a better understanding of theinteraction of food and bioenergy production.

Political clarity for stability in land use

Processes of land-use change were discussed onDay 2 of the IAMO Forum. Johann Swinnen, LICOSDirector and Professor of Development Economicsat Catholic University Leuven, detailed dierencesand problems resulting from restructuring ofEuropean agriculture. Large dierences in landreforms and land values were observed in the newEU member states and land acquisition by foreign

investors was severely restricted after accessionto the EU. Transitional regulations (which willsoon lapse, except in Poland) were in place inthe new member states where land acquisitionby foreigners should have been permitted underEU legislation. Percentages of leased land varygrossly and reect the existing farm structuresin the dierent countries. According to Swinnen,restrictions in land exchange have a negativeinuence on rural development. Land ownershiplaws impact both eciency and justice. Increasesin foreign direct investments mostly have positiveconsequences for receiving countries due to capitaland technology inux. Swinnen recommends afull liberalisation of land markets in the new EUmember states.

Subsequently, Grigory Ioe, Professor ofGeography, Radford University, presented reasonsfor large-scale land abandonment in the Russianagricultural sector. The Russian governmenthad vigorously pursued extension of farmlandfor many decades, resulting in an increase from52 million ha in 1922 to 126 million ha in 1976,even in regions with unfavourable conditionsfor agriculture. Withdrawal of the governmentsupport after 1990 brought about a dramaticcollapse in agricultural production and livestocklevels in Russia. At least 20 million ha of farmland

had been set aside in Russia since 2000. Even in2009 agricultural production in Russia was below

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the 1990 level. Decisive determinants for landabandonment and production decline include lowpopulation densities, soil qualities and proximityto urban centres. Ioe predicted that large-scaleabandoning of agriculture will continue outsidecatchment areas of larger towns in northernRussia while agriculture will survive in southernRussia due to favourable conditions. Subsidiesfor maintenance and extension of arable land aredesirable, Ioestated.

Investments with skills and responsibilityOn the nal day of the Forum, Max Spoor, Professorof Development Studies, International Instituteof Social Studies in The Hague, gave a criticalassessment of whether agro-holdings in Russiawill contribute to solve the global food crisis. InRussia, 80% of farmland is managed by large-scaleenterprises (agro-holdings), but land productivityin the Russian grain sector is very low compared tothe USA and Canada. Family farms achieve similaror even higher yields than large farms in varioustypes of agriculture. Moreover, agro-holdings in

Russia have higher supervisory costs and oftenpost-Soviet managements. Recultivation of fertileagricultural land and investments into large farmenterprises were anticipated to increase wheatproduction rates. This gave rise to the visionthat the breadbaskets of Russia, Ukraine andKazakhstan could make a signicant contributionto increasing global food production. But Spoorquestioned the existence of an automatism underwhich Russias agro-holdings will contribute tosolving global food problems in view of the loweciency of large agricultural enterprises in Russiaand regular crop failures due to water scarcity andaggravating climate changes.

World Bank Economist Klaus Deiningerpointed inhis presentation to the fact that there were manyexamples for a so-called resource curse (paradoxof plenty) with negative consequences for aectedcountries and their populations. Such impactswere frequently attributable to inappropriatebehaviour of market participants. Responsible andsuitable policies are however required to harnessforeign investments in order to achieve positiveeects in employment, curbing poverty and foodsecurity. One decisive aspect in the context ofland grabbing is a responsible consideration ofpeoples needs by governments and enterprises.Existing land rights should be recognised and

formalised, government land managementimproved and information made more transparentfor the general public. According to Deininger, go-vernments should especially promote competitivesmall-and-medium-sized enterprises within theagricultural sector. IAMOs research priorities andcompetences can make a considerable contributionto a positive development in this eld.

A further highlight of the conference was theconcluding panel discussion titled Large-scaleFarmland Investments and Land Grabbing.Max Spoor and Klaus Deininger as well as thePresident of the Ukrainian Agribusiness ClubsAlex Lissitsa, Christian Ebmeyer from the Russian

agro-holding Ekoniva and Maren Kneller, DivisionHead Rural Development and Global Nutrition atthe Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperationand Development discussed the challenges ofand appropriate handling of large-scale landacquisitions and leases by foreign and domestic

investors. The controversial views of the panellistsemphasised dierent strategies in terms ofwhether agricultural family businesses or largeagro-holdings can provide the most promisingsolution. The view that was shared by theparticipants was that the topic of land grabbingwould be a wide eld for research also in thefuture and should be oriented towards improvedassessments of chances and risks in agricultureand ensuring responsible dealing with people, theenvironment and the climate.

Further information

http://forum2012.iamo.deLeibniz Institute of Agricultural Development inCentral and Eastern Europe (IAMO)

About IAMO

The Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Developmentin Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO) is aninternationally recognised research institution.With more than 60 researchers and in cooperation

with other renowned institutes, IAMO scienticallyinvestigates fundamental issues in the agriculturaland food sectors and rural regions. Central andEastern Europe as well as Central and EasternAsia are the main regions under review. Since itsfoundation in 1994, IAMO has been a member ofthe Leibniz Community (WGL) as an extramuralresearch institute.

Photo 1:Presentation in Lecture Hall at the 2012 IAMO Forum.

Photo 2: Plenary Session on farmland investments and land grabbing.

Photo 3: Presentation by Alexej Lissitsa on Ukrainian agriculture.

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Evgeny Gordov1

1 Director of Siberian Center for Environmental Research &Training and Principalresearcher at the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems SB RAS

Akademicheskii Ave. 10/3 TOMSK, 634055, RUSSIA

e-mail: [email protected]

web page http://www.scert.ru/en/about/persons/gordov/

Overview ofmultidisciplinary

ENVIROMISconferences

The multidisciplinary conferences comprisingelements of Early Career Scientists School onEnvironmental Observations, Modeling andInformation Systems (ENVIROMIS) have quitea long story (http://www.scert.ru/en/confe-rences/). They were established as a response

to contemporary needs in both multidisciplinarycomprehensive studies covering all environmentalissues: atmosphere, hydrosphere, climate andecological changes, and young scientists training.Implementation of FP5 project on IntegratedSystem for Intelligent Regional EnvironmentalMonitoring & Management - ISIREMM (http://isiremm.scert.ru/, http://www.ess.co.at/ISIREMM/,1999-2002) could be considered as the startingpoint of this activity. By the time of the projectimplementation some problems have arose,associated with misunderstandings betweenspecialists working on dierent areas and the factthat the young scientists involved had no sucientknowledge in IT support on environmentalsciences. Therefore the decision has been madeto organize in 2000 a multidisciplinary conferenceENVIROMIS-2000 in Tomsk. This conference wasdevoted to the-state-of-the-art and usage ofmodern environmental observation techniques,modeling tools and information technologies forair, water, soil and vegetation, cover pollutionassessment in integrated information systemsaimed at environmental management for industrialareas on city and regional scales. It was aimed atlling a gap between basic science achievementsand their practical applications in this domain as

well as at creating a solid foundation for mitigationof pollution in selected areas.

After ENVIROMIS-2000, other conferences wereorganized every two years. The seventh recentlynished ENVIROMIS-2012 (Irkutsk, June 24 July 2, 2012) conference continued topics onenvironment state and dynamics of NorthernEurasia and Siberia investigation with the emphasison extreme weather events. At the conference,topics were discussed on ongoing climate changesover Northern Eurasia, regional climate modeling,terrestrial ecosystems of Northern Eurasia

and global biogeochemical cycles, air pollutiontransport and climate change. It was presented alecture devoted to recent trends in regional andglobal intense precipitation patterns, where itwas noted that the tendencies, which emergedduring the past 40-50 years with a disproportional

increase in precipitation coming from intenserain events, should lead to breaks in the parallelincrease/decrease of both total precipitationand precipitation frequency. If continued, thesetendencies may lead to an increase in the frequencyof another potentially dangerous type of extremeevents: prolonged periods without precipitation(even when the mean seasonal rainfall totalsincrease).

It was also presented an analysis of glaciationdynamics on East Siberia and in Mongoliaand another lecture described estimations ofuncertainties in future climate modeling using MIT

Integrated Global System Model, which couplesan economic component the MIT EmissionsPrediction and Policy Analysis model to a climatemodel of intermediate complexity. Results ontesting WRF capabilities for future use in the pan-Arctic mode and assessing the importance of the2007 sea ice retreat for hydrologic conditions onthe Alaskan North Slope were shown, as well as theapplication of the regional climate model COSMO-CLM (developed by the German Weather Service)for Siberia to access the added value compared tothe driving reanalysis. A focus on remotely-sensedre data products, some of which can be easilyaccessed using Geographic Information System(GIS) was also presented. Results of internationalteam works on studying carbon cycle in Siberiahave been presented in many reports from alldierent institutes. An overview of some resultson continuous measurements carried out inSiberia in the framework of some internationalprojects aimed to document spatial and temporaldistribution of greenhouse gases and aerosols wasdiscussed as well as the analysis of hydrologicalprocesses across Russia using contemporaryGIS systems and near real time information andthe environmental forecasting on the base of

Photo 1: Discussion during postersession.

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online-integrated modeling technology basedon oscillating principles and data assimilationmethods.

Taking into account the importance of the topicsconcerning environmental and socio-economicalconsequences of climate change and relatedextremes as well as organizational, observationaland ICT inf

inter disciplinarity, human environment interactions

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