Assessment methods for land cover and land use change and interaction with climate change

Analysis of land use and land cover changes are fundamental for assessments related to climate and emission inventories. There are complex interactions between land use/cover changes and climate changes often linked by feedbacks that make it difficult to distinguish impacts from causes (Verburg et al., 2009). Land use and land cover information mainly are from cartographic, census data and surveys data. Data comparison from different sources is often hampered by problems of uncertainty and inconsistency due to differences in definition of land use and land cover classification, temporal and spatial scale. An analysis of these inconsistencies could help to make more appropriate use of the data in climate change assessments. Land use and land cover are not the same. The land use function of a land cover type needs to be known in order to understand changes in land cover (Pelorosso et al., 2009). This study provides a method to compare data from different sources, a historical and a recent remote sensing-derived map, by homogenized them in order to reduce misleading changes and to assess spatial aggregation errors. This was done through a data integration procedure based on landscape metrics. The results allowed the different dynamics of a wide area in central Italy to be identified, bringing to light divergences between the trends suggested by census and cartographic data. The presented method could be used to assess and improve land use/cover changes analysis either if based only on land use census data or if based on land cover cartographic data.