Land System Science and Our Urban Landscapes

All aspects of the earth system -- atmosphere, land, oceans, watersheds, ice covers, and the biosphere -- are essential to the health of life on earth and play a role in our changing climate. All these components of our environment are affected by human activities at all scales.

Land is perhaps the most clearly changed by human activities. Cities are the places where we can most see human changes to the landscapes across the globe as well as over time. Technological advancement, population growth, and urbanization all lead to the expansion of urban areas. Urban landscapes form their own climates, thanks to buildings, paved surfaces, waste and heat emissions, thinned flora and fauna, and impacts on waterways.

Urbanization has increased rapidly over time and, until only about 2007, the majority of the globe's population lived in rural areas (Ritchie 2018). Urban climates are so different from their rural counterparts and in significant ways that impact their increased population density, built land-cover materials, and pollution generation has on their inhabitants' health and the global climate. With urban development often comes increased transportation needs, industry, consumption, ecosystem impacts, air and water pollution, the urban heat island effect among other negative environmental changes. Yet cities also offer the potential to concentrate human populations and decrease transportation needs as well as free up rural spaces to be better preserved.

While significant overall, broad statements like these ignore the details and complexity relevant at smaller scales. One study looks to move beyond the "urban-rural dichotomy" by examining the magnitude of land use conversions in Europe. They found that "most urban land changes between 2000 and 2014 come in small incremental changes, rather than sudden large-scale conversions from rural to urban land" and urban land use varies greatly even within 1 square kilometer (Vliet et al. 2019). This article argues for a mosaic of various land-use classes and intensities.

Making the links between human societies, land use, and environmental harm is essential to being able to understand what tradeoffs are relevant as stakeholders and environmental leaders move toward a more sustainable future. The field of land system science does just that: seeks to understand the drivers of this land use change and apply that knowledge in designing sustainable transformations in land use (Verburg et al. 2016).

"Land use can be seen as the largest geo-engineering project in which mankind has engaged. Land system science can act as a platform for integration of insight from different disciplines, design of novel land system solutions and for translation of knowledge in action" (Verburg et al. 2016)

Land cover is important at very large scales, from global to national. It can be hard though to really grasp the long term changes and on the ground impact at such large scales. In order to better understand what land cover change looks like over time, and how it impacts microclimate, we are grounding this topic in the Lewis & Clark College campus. Examining change at this scale is very manageable and helps one to better understand what is happening. Because it is a college campus, there are carefully documented historical photos that help show land cover change over time and gives us a real sense of change over time. Additionally, this area has a wide variety of ground cover types and provides an interesting setting to study how land cover change, ground cover, and micro climate are related. 

In this context of the Lewis & Clark Campus, we conducted basic research on land cover and micro climate and focused on these questions:

1. What had land cover change looked like at L&C through time?
2. What relationship can we see between microclimate and land cover?

Research Methods

To better explore the LUCC and its impacts at the scale of Lewis & Clark, we conducted research on microclimate and ground cover for 14 sites across the college campus as well as the nearby River View Natural Area. For the microclimate study we monitored the microclimate at each site for the same 24-hour period using Kestrel Drops. For the ground cover study we collected observations on ground cover, canopy cover, and classified the locations by MUC codes (Modified UNESCO Classification Codes) to determine the land cover type.

The data that was collected does have many limits, so the results aren't concrete findings, but they can demonstrate a relationship between micro climate and ground cover.

This data is very limited in scope and scale and even admittedly in accuracy, but it is a demonstration that micro climate is effected by ground cover and canopy cover. This exploration is not necessarily useful for the specific data, but for the ability to contextualize the broad topic of land use and cover change into the more understandable and small context of a college campus.

Our look at land use cover change on the Lewis & Clark College campus can serve as an example of citizen science and as a model method for data collection at other sites. Using historical photos to give greater meaning to current looks at LUCC can also be helpful when looking at other locations with long histories of human-environment interaction. 

This study is limited largely by user error and difficulty attaining reputable and accurate data. Since there were so many opportunities for error, most of the data is difficult to analyze and achieve accurate understandings of. However, there are general trends present in the data that are at least somewhat reliable and perhaps offer insight into some of the pros and cons of citizen science.

Citizen science engages those most concerned with their communities and provides opportunities for participants to make a direct contribution to research, increase their scientific understanding, and immerse themselves in learning about environmental issues (Earthwatch Institute 2020).

Looking at changes from multiple scales allows us to better grasp global-scale changes and make sense of what we observe. Although looking at a single college campus might seem insignificant, looking at Lewis & Clark, a site which we are very familiar with, makes our findings that much more relevant, important, and easy to understand. Lewis & Clark’s diverse land cover use makes it perfect for studying a micro version of macro trends and LUCC/climate connections. How have microclimates changed on the Lewis & Clark campus over time? How can we use historical change patterns to make better land use change decisions in the future?

Thank you to Jessica Kleiss for guiding us through data collection and analysis and for our classmates in 220 for collectively gathering data and for supporting one another through our analyses.