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The Southeastern United States has high landscape heterogeneity, with heavily managed forestlands, developed agriculture, and multiple metropolitan areas. The spatial pattern of land use is dynamic. Expansion of urban areas convert forested and agricultural land, scrub forests are converted to citrus groves, and some croplands transition to pine plantations. Previous studies have recognized that forest management is the predominant factor in structural and functional changes forests, but little is known about how forest management practices interact with surrounding land uses at the regional scale. The first step in studying the spatial relationships of forest management with surrounding landscapes is to be able to map management practices and describe their proximity to various land uses. There are two major difficulties in generating land use and land management maps at the regional scale by any method: the necessity of large training data sets and expensive computation. The combination of crowdsourced, citizen-science mapping and cloud-based computing may help overcome those difficulties. In this study, OpenStreetMap is incorporated into mapping land use and shows great potential for justifying and monitoring land use at a regional scale. Google Earth Engine enables large-scale spatial analysis and imagery processing by providing a variety of Earth observation datasets and computational resources. By incorporating the OpenStreetMap dataset into Earth observation images to map forest land management practices and determine the distribution of other nearby land uses, we develop a robust regional land-use mapping approach and describe the patterns of how different land uses may affect forest management and vice versa . We find that cropland is more likely to be near ecological forest management patches; few close spatial relationships exist between land uses and preservation forest management, which fulfills the preservation management strategy of sustaining the forests, and production forests have the strongest spatial relationships with croplands. This approach leads to increased understanding of land-use patterns and management practices at local to regional scales.
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A confluence of communities: households and land use at the junction of the Upper Usumacinta and Lacantún Rivers, Chiapas, Mexico
Constructed landscapes are composed of diverse communities, representing different social strata and perspectives of a place. In turn, the risks associated with inhabiting unpredictable environments are disproportionately felt across urban and rural landscapes. The mitigation and management of risks often fall on farming and smallholder communities, influencing decentralized strategies. These themes are explored in an archaeological context surrounding the confluence of the Upper Usumacinta and Lacantún Rivers in the neotropical Maya lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico. LiDAR data collected recently with the GatorEye unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) and NASA’s GLiHT system have aided in the mapping of the archaeological urban centre of Benemérito de las Américas, Primera Sección and the surrounding landscape. These data have revealed coupled settlement with land management, in the form of wetland fields, reservoirs, and riverways, emphasizing the interconnectivity of household practice and land use in the region.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1849921
- PAR ID:
- 10315291
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- World Archaeology
- ISSN:
- 0043-8243
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1930135
