Springer Land Change Science in the Tropics: Changing Agricultural Landscapes

Coca markets, anti-coca policies as drivers of agricultural land use change in Bolivia.- Cooperatives, Agricultural Development, and Land Change on a Frontier in the Brazilian Cerrado.- Detection, drivers, and dynamics of LULCC in the Sahel: Linking scientists with local decision-makers.- From Farms to Forest Fragments: Agricultural Transition and its Implications.- Land-Use Dynamics and Political-Ecological Aspects: The Spanish Dehesa-System.- Market Integration and Market Realities on a Mexican Frontier.- Migration and other driving forces of land use/cover change in a rural context in western Mexico.- Modern Agriculture on Tropical Frontiers: Rethinking Methods for Land Change Research.- Stasis and flux in long-inhabited locales: Change in rural Andean landscapes.- Study of the economic and financial viability of two agroforestry models as sustainable choices for agriculture in Rondonia, Brasil.- The impact of a fluctuating agenda at the international level on cocoa farms in the humid forest zone of West and Central Africa: Current issues, research and development implications.- The Impact of Climate Change on Income Diversification and Food Security in Senegal.- Understanding Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum (L.) Kuhn) Invasion in Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region through Integrated Land-Change Science.- Coffee and Landscape change in Colombia 1970-2002: linking agricultural intensification and land-use and land-cover change.- The tobacco industry and land cover in agricultural regions of southern Africa.- Land use and land cover in traditional swidden cultivation systems in upland SE Asia.- Land use and land cover in the Indo-Gangetic Plains. From the Back Cover Land use and land-cover change research over the past decade has focused mainly on contemporary primary land-cover conversions in the tropics and sub-tropics, with considerable resources dedicated to the explanation and prediction of tropical deforestation and often ignoring the dynamism in the world’s agro-pastoral landscapes. This collection integrates cutting-edge research in the social, biogeophysical, and geographical information sciences to understand the human and environmental dynamics that change the type, magnitude and location of land uses and land covers in the changing countryside. Our contributors are from across the globe and draw on diverse empirical pan-tropical case studies and disciplinary influences. The research reported examines land-use and land-cover change in Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Malawi, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal and Thailand. Each chapter in this book advances one of three themes: (i) adaptations and change in settled agricultural zones, (ii) agricultural intensification, and (iii) markets and institutions. This book describes the monitoring of land-cover changes, explains the processes through which land is altered, and describes the development of spatially-explicit models to predict land change. This book illustrates how practitioners have integrated knowledge from the three scientific realms - social, biophysical, and GIScience - that underpin land-change science. About the Author Andrew Millington is Professor of Geography and Director of Environmental Programs in Geosciences at Texas A&M University. He was previously Chair of the Dept of Geography at Leicester University, has worked at the Universities of Reading and Sierra Leone, and has been Visiting Professor at University College, Dublin and the University of Gent. He has received B.Sc. (Hull University, 1973), M.A. (University of Colorado, 1977) and D. Phil. (University of Sussex, 1985) degrees. He has researched natural resources issues in western Asia, Africa and South America with funding from the European Union, The World Bank and the UK Natural Environmental Research Council. He was formerly Editor of The Geographical Journal and he serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of