Subproject 3: Ecosystems and livelihoods

This sub-project focusses on the state of rural rangelands, its ability to provide ecosystem services and vulnerability under future global change which includes anthropogenic land transformation.

The dimension of the physical and biological environment is captured by surveys, ground truth measurements and remote sensing, a technology that will allow coverage of spatio-temporal variation along climatic and pedological gradients. The coupling of dynamic growth models with remotely sensed information on vegetation will enable us to make predictions on current and future land use patterns, hot spots and episodic events of degradation and its response to a wider range of climate scenarios.

The link between socio-economic and ecological aspects will be at the centre of our research, including feedbacks of management to vegetation state and productivity. Project activities on GIS and remote sensing will be coordinated with SP1 for the benefit of common processing and interpretation of spatial data, integration of dynamic modeling of vegetation phenology and its incorporation of algorithms into the dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM).