Farming the Planet: Agricultural land use and the transformation of Planet Earth
Abstract
Agriculture has dramatically altered the face of our planet. Roughly a third of the world's landscape is currently being used for cultivation or grazing cattle. Furthermore, over the last 50 years, our food production system has been driven by agricultural intensification, through increased use of irrigation and fertilization. Such large-scale changes in land cover and land use can have major Earth system consequences. Nonetheless, few descriptions are available of the nature and extent of these changes. In this talk, I will describe recent work in the use of remote-sensing and ground-based data to derive global data sets of agricultural land cover and land use practices. I will present results from mapping the world's croplands and pastures, the harvested area and yield of 175 different crops, and fertilizer application rates for the Year 2000.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008AGUFM.B44B..01R
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- 0434 Data sets;
- 1622 Earth system modeling (1225);
- 1630 Impacts of global change (1225);
- 1632 Land cover change