Land cover change and socioecological influences on terrestrial carbon production in an agroecosystem

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2023

Publication Title

Landscape Ecology

Keywords

Land cover and land use change, Net primary production, PLS-SEM, Socio-environmental systems

Abstract

Context: This study evaluated the contributions of land cover and land use change (LCLUC) and land management to landscape carbon production through a complex cause-effect path analysis of socioecological latent variables. Socioecological contributions to landscape carbon production are essential in landscape analysis, as their processes are both independent and interactive. Objectives: We quantify the coherencies of social, economic, and environmental variables and their impact on net primary production (NPP) in an agroecosystem landscape. We ask whether LCLUC contributed to increased NPP and if land management and LCLUC play a more significant role than abiotic stressors on NPP. Methods: We applied a socio-environmental system framework to evaluate anthropogenic and environmental processes in the Kalamazoo River Watershed in southwest Michigan, USA from 1987 to 2017. Structural composition and functional contribution to NPP were evaluated by land cover type. We synthesized remote sensing, gridded climate, social and biophysical data in a principal component analysis (PCA) to inform a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM). Results: Land cover type contributed to anthropogenic processes. Cropland contributed to Land Management, forest and water contributed to Land Cover Change, and urban to the Regional Development construct. Anthropogenic activities contributed more to NPP than abiotic processes. Attitudes of environmental stewardship strongly related to land use change likelihood. Conclusions: We disentangled anthropogenic and climatic changes’ contributions to terrestrial carbon production and the societal ties to potential carbon sequestration. No single landscape metric is suitable for all study areas; however, this framework is useful for a landscape-scale analysis of socio-environmental processes.

Volume

38

Issue

12

First Page

3845

Last Page

3867

ISSN

09212973

E-ISSN

15729761

DOI

10.1007/s10980-023-01647-5

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