Land Systems and Global Change

Land systems (including land-use systems) are complex social–ecological systems composed of interacting social and biological actors, terrestrial environments, and the feedback among these components that shape the dynamics of Earth’s land surface across different scales, from local landscapes to global commodity chains. Land system science aims to understand these complex two-way interactions towards informing more sustainable governance of Earth’s land, including efforts to adapt to, manage, and mitigate coupled changes in climate, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, food systems, social systems (including economics as well as issues of power and inequality), new technologies, energy systems, water systems, and other interacting social and ecological dynamics that shape the future of Earth’s land.

The transdisciplinary methods and tools of land system science are diverse and cut across the social and natural sciences in addition to the practices of environmental governance. Research methods include the remote sensing of land cover and land use and other approaches to social and environmental mapping as well as analysis, case studies of the causes and consequences of social and environmental change on the ground, metastudies and other approaches to knowledge synthesis, and regional as well as global simulations of coupled human–environment interactions over time. Applied land system science investigates and informs the operations of land systems, including strategies for researching and negotiating tradeoffs in addition to competing demands among diverse stakeholder populations, the governance of multifunctional landscapes, national and international policies and informal institutions governing land rights and access to land and other resources, commodity production and trade, the conservation and restoration of native habitats, and food system architectures at regional and global scales.

We invite authors to submit articles to Land that help to advance the scientific and applied understanding of the functioning and dynamics of land systems from regional to global scales. Articles that meet these goals, including the development of new scientific methods and governance tools that help translate knowledge into action, are welcome.