Four Geography Faculty Publish Book on Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands

Editors: Walsh, S.J., Riveros-Iregui, D., Acre-Nazario, J., Page, P.H. (Eds.)

Springer-Nature (2020)
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030439729

Globalization in the 21st century is posing new challenges to humans and natural ecosystems. From climate change to increasingly mobile human populations to the global economy, the relationship between humans and their environment is being modified in ways that will have long-term impacts on ecological health, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, human activities, land cover/land use change (LCLUC), and system sustainability. These changes and challenges are perhaps nowhere more evident than in island ecosystems. Influenced by rising ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, sea-level rise, tourism, population migration and development, and invasive species, islands represent great vulnerabilities as well as important scientific opportunities for studying the impacts and significance of global change on ecosystem processes and island sustainability. In addition to assessing the key processes that shape and re-shape island ecosystems and their land cover/land use changes, the book highlights measurement and assessment methods to characterize patterns and trajectories of change and models to examine the social-ecological drivers of change on islands. The authors in this edited volume report on a diversity of islands, conditions, and circumstances that affect LCLUC patterns and processes, often informed through perspectives rooted, for instance, in conservation, demography, ecology, economics, geography, policy, and sociology.