Human Driving Forces
and Their Impacts on Land Use/Land Cover

W hen we think of global environmental changes, many of us think first of the large-scale deforestation of the Amazon and Southeast Asian rainforests, of desertification in dry land areas of Africa, or of habitat destruction and the resulting loss of biodiversity. These are the land use and land cover changes that have received the most attention in the popular press and in the scientific literature, but land use/cover changes have occurred at all times in the past, are presently ongoing, and are likely to continue in the future in all parts of the world. The most profound questions facing scientists working on land use and global change are:

• What forces drive land use/land cover change?,
• What impacts -- direct and indirect, now and in the future -- do these changes have on the environment and on human society? and lastly,
• How can we respond to these changes most effectively?

This module introduces students to the complexities inherent in these questions and focuses primarily upon the first of question. The first unit of the module introduces students to the human dimensions of global change and to the central role that the study of land use/land cover change plays within the larger field of global environmental and climatic change. In the second unit, students learn about selected land use/land cover areas and take a critical look at the available data. In the third unit, students relate land use changes to human driving forces; by linking changes at a global scale to those at a local scale, the module activities make global change a personal concern.

The module's main objectives are:

• To provide an overview of the interaction among driving forces, proximate sources, and environmental impacts of land use/cover changes;
• To problematize the collection, compilation, and assessment of data on regional and global land use/land cover change; and
• To assess some general relationships between land use/land cover changes and human driving forces.

The module introduces the concepts of systemic vs. cumulative global change, human driving and mitigating forces, proximate sources of change, and land use/land cover. It illustrates the extreme difficulties of data collection and assessment so fundamental to the study of global processes, and it involves students in using some of the essential analytical tools of scientific research (e.g., regression, correlation, scatterplots). Students learn to appreciate the crucial importance of scale in global change studies, particularly in drawing inferences from the results of the statistical analysis. In sum, the module teaches students about land use/cover change in the context of global change and builds a critical understanding of the research process.