Titel:
"Climate-relevant land cover composition and configuration trajectories in Europe"
Description:
Author: Marco Ferro
Did you know that both land cover composition and configuration play a crucial role in regulating the local climate? At the local scale, climate-regulating functions are influenced not only by the proportions of land cover types (composition) but also by their spatial arrangement (configuration). However, most research on land use and land cover change (LULCC) and climate examines these aspects separately. This limits our understanding of how their combined dynamics affect climate over time and space. In this study, we analyzed LULCC across Europe from 1992 to 2015 using multiple landscape metrics and Self-Organizing Maps to identify dominant trajectories of LULCC. We then assessed the climate relevance of the five most common trajectories using a high-resolution regional climate model. More than 20% of Europe experienced simultaneous changes in both composition and configuration, with major transitions from cropland to forest patches and bare soil. Climate simulations revealed increased topsoil temperatures and greater variability during the crop growing season, particularly in areas undergoing forest transitions. You can access it via the following link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adc8be
In the series “My paper in 140s”, scientists from the Collaborative Research Center 1502 'DETECT' present syntheses of their project work that have been published in peer-reviewed papers.
