资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Land change including deforestation undermines the sustainability of the environment. Using data on 1992-2015 pattern change in over 1.7 million mesoscale landscapes worldwide we developed a stochastic model of long-term landscape dynamics. The model suggests that observed heterogeneous landscapes are short-lived stages in a transition between quasi-stable homogeneous landscapes of different themes. As a case study we used Monte Carlo simulations based on our model to derive a probability distribution for evolutionary scenarios of landscapes that undergo a forest-to-agriculture transit, a prevalent element of deforestation. Results of simulations show that most likely and the fastest deforestation scenario is through the sequence of highly aggregated forest/agriculture mosaics with a decreasing share of the forest. Simulations also show that once forest share drops below 50% the remainder of the transit is rapid. This suggests that possible conservation policy is to protect mesoscale tracts of land before the forest share drops below 50%.