Yucatan, Mexico
Yucatan, Mexico
GEO 6938 (Land Use Land Cover Change Seminar) has a required nine-day fieldwork component in the Yucatan, Mexico. This field course includes a number of UF faculty. Roger Medina Gonzalez and his students from the Universidad de Yucatan Autonama (UADY), located in Merida, Mexico also join us for the course. Formal relationships with UADY, both as part of the WFT Program (UF - Working Forests in the Tropics, PI: Dr. Dan Zarin) but also in terms of proposed research activities, are underway.
In addition, past research in Yucatan ($8,000 from CIPEC for fieldwork) has resulted in a publication (Southworth 2004), and research is ongoing in this region with graduate students from the class and the NSF IGERT Working Forests in the Tropics Program.
Summary: Gaining a better understanding of the ways that land cover and land use practices evolve is a primary concern for the global change research community. Changes in land cover impacts climate, as well as the diversity and abundance of terrestrial ecosystems. Hence, the ability to project future states of land cover is a requirement for making predictions about other global changes, because anthropogenic causes drives land-cover change (Turner et. al., 1993).
In tropical regions, many land cover changes of ecological and climatic significance are currently taking place such as colonization of marginal lands, deforestation, drylands degradation, landscape fragmentation, and rapid urbanization (Lampin, 1994). Although tropical dry forests cover more area than humid forests, there have been few studies of their functions, structure, and processes even though they are greatly affected by human activity (Whigham et. al., 1990). Such analyses require repetitive surveys and in this context remote sensing can be a powerful tool (Estève et al., 1998). In addition, these issues need to be monitored and studied across a range of temporal scales and across local, regional, and global spatial scales (Hall et al., 1991). Again, this highlights the usefulness of remote sensing for addressing such research areas.
Spatial information on existing land uses is important for the analysis of current environmental conditions and to estimate and determine future land use activities. Traditionally, land cover has been used as the principal surrogate for land use when remotely sensed data have been used. Although land use and land cover may be closely related, they are conceptually different, describe two different themes, and are determined by two different, non-interchangeable data sets. Thus, accurate analysis of land cover characteristics using remotely sensed data is a prerequisite for determining land use, which is a necessary input for Land Use Land Cover Change (LULCC) models. The use of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM and ETM+) data for land cover classification of vegetation types is becoming increasingly successful (Li et. al., 1994; Mausel et. al., 1993). The ability to monitor and measure changes in land use and land cover within these areas is critical to addressing questions concerning changing climate and other issues pertaining to deforestation in many tropical regions (Li et al., 1994). In addition we can measure land-surface temperature, which is one of the most important land-surface parameters (Wittich, 1997; Sobrino et al., 1991).
Of specific interest within this study region are technical improvements within land cover chnage analyses for the monitoring of vegetation. The Yucatan, due to its relatively flat topography, sandy soils and lack of surface water is a great experimental region for such research.
Research Narrative
