XVI International Botanical Congess

Land-use change, and its concomitant effects on habitat loss and landscape fragmentation, is arguably the most critical factor driving declines in biodiversity. Ecologists are increasingly seeking to integrate research on the drivers of land-use change into projects investigating biodiversity. Local-scale and global-scale analyses of land-use change can result in identification of different key driving forces. While population and economic factors have strong statistical correlation with biodiversity change at the global level, local case studies reveal that economics, policies and institutional arrangements (e.g., commodity price shifts, government subsidies) are more important in determining land use at landscape scales. Using case studies, I explore the utility of remotely sensed images for inferring the dominant scale of social and economic drivers of land-use change.