Land Use, Climate Change and Biodiversity Modeling

How humans use terrestrial land affects the earth and all life forms on it. Biodiversity loss and climate change are consequences of the same inappropriate and careless uses of land that negatively impact ecosystems on a smaller scale. Land Use, Climate Change and Biodiversity Modeling: Perspectives and Applications combines state-of-the-art modeling approaches at various scales with case studies from across the world. These examples help natural resource managers, scientists, and decision makers overcome their fear of models. The case studies show how to translate models into results and illustrate how pro-active implementation can mitigate biodiversity loss. This material will interest individual researchers, but it is also critical for policy-makers committed to the future of the planet.

Yongyut Trisurat is an Associate Professor of Forestry at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand. He received PhD in natural resources management and conservation from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Thailand. He was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Geography, Freie University Berlin in 1995, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar affiliated with University of Hawaii and the East-West Center in 2005, and a Visiting Researcher at AIT in 2009. He has been active in the area of protected areas, biodiversity conservation, landscape ecology and GIS for over 15 years and has been a frequent contributor to several international agencies (e.g., ITTO, IUCN, ADB, CIDA, DANCED/DANIDA, WWF). His current research involves biodiversity conservation and climate change. In addition, he has published a number of peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on these subjects.

Rajendra P Shrestha received his PhD in natural resources management and currently is an Associate Professor at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. His areas of research interests include land use and land cover change focusing on land change/degradation-human interface for policy support in the context of climate change. He also has interest in livelihood studies and food security in relation to land use. He has extensively published on these topics in southeast and south Asia. His research collaboration has been with several organizations, FAO, UNDP, UNEP, IUCN, WAC and the universities in the region. Previously, he has worked as lecturer and agriculture officer in Nepal. He was also a Senior Programme Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme, Bangkok, a Visiting Scientist at Nihon University of Japan, and Roskilde University of Denmark.

Rob Alkemade is a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). He obtained his PhD at Wageningen University in the role of nematodes in coastal ecosystems. He developed and applied models for assessing the effects of environmental change on biodiversity, first at the National Institute for the Environment and Public Health (RIVM) and later at PBL. He has a wide experience in biodiversity assessment and scenario analysis at the global level and contributed to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Global Environmental Outlooks and Global Biodiversity Outlooks. For this purpose, he developed the GLOBIO3 model. He is a visiting scientist at Wageningen University doing research on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services.