Land use - ecosystem - Climate interactions in monsoon Asia: Projecting land-use/cover
impacts on carbon, water, and climate in the first half of the 21st century.

Hanqin Tian, Professor

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The monsoon Asia has experienced rapid changes in land cover and land use (LCLU) and is
likely to undergo further rapid development in the coming years. There is a rapidly increasing
concern that LCLU Change (LCLUC) caused by urbanization, deforestation/afforestation, desertification and
biofuel production may affect local, regional and global climate and further influence the
provision of goods and services by terrestrial ecosystems in the region of monsoon Asia. In this
project, the goals are to understand complex interactions among land use, ecosystem and climate and to
evaluate the impacts of current and projected LCLUC on climate, water and carbon cycling in the region
of monsoon Asia in the first half of 21st century by using an integrated model of regional climate,
ecosystem, land use and economy; remote sensing and field observations. Multiple sensor remote
sensing data, such as AVHRR, MODIS, and Landsat TM/ETM+, as well as global and regional
remote sensing-derived products, model-derived data, field observations, and demographic-economic
data, will be used to develop time-series LCLUC data sets from 1700 to 2050. We will develop and use
an Integrated Regional Earth System Model (IRESM) to explore the complex interactions among
land use, ecosystems and monsoon climate. We will, in particular, evaluate the effects of
urbanization, deforestation/afforestion, desertification, etc., and predict its potential effects, on
climate, water, and carbon cycles in the monsoon Asia. This project contributes the goals of NASA LCLUC program in (1) developing the capability to perform repeated global inventories of LCLU from space; (2) evaluating the consequences of observed and predicted changes; and (3) furthering the understanding of the
consequences of LCLUC on the carbon and water cycles. This project will answer the key questions solicited in the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS), such as “what will the monsoon Asian region be like in 50 years?” “What will be the consequences of these projected changes for the welfare of the Asia region?” and “what will be the consequences of these changes for the Earth system?”