Downscaling land-use data to provide global 30″ estimates of five land-use classes.

ABSTRACT: Land-use change is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity globally. The effects of land use on biodiversity manifest primarily at local scales which are not captured by the coarse spatial grain of current global land-use mapping. Assessments of land-use impacts on biodiversity across large spatial extents require data at a similar spatial grain to the ecological processes they are assessing. Here, we develop a method for statistically downscaling mapped land-use data that combines generalized additive modeling and constrained optimization. This method was applied to the 0.5° Land-use Harmonization data for the year 2005 to produce global 30″ (approx. 1 km(2)) estimates of five land-use classes: primary habitat, secondary habitat, cropland, pasture, and urban. The original dataset was p

SUBMITTER: Hoskins AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4814442 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature