Landscape transformation through the use of ecological and socioeconomic indicators in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China, Mekong Region
By Jian-chu Xu, R. Grumbine, P. Beckschäfer. 2014
190 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Rapid land-use transformations are occurring throughout the Mekong Region, and especially in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province in southwest China. Most of this is due to the spread of monoculture rubber plantations. Using a new map derived from Landsat and RapidEye imagery tracking the spread of rubber from 1992 to 2010 in combination with a literature review and interviews with key local experts and officials, we performed a general overview of the extent, causes and consequences of landscape transformation in Xishuangbanna. We discovered that structural and functional biodiversity has been reduced, habitat fragmentation has increased,,carbon sequestration in natural forests has been reduced, and hydrological systems altered. For humans, while incomes have risen, food insecurity has also grown. The drivers of these changes are regional economic integration, government policy, and conservation vs development value systems. To improve land-use management, we surveyed the availability of ecological and socioeconomic indicators that may better track such changes. We found that combining both types of indicators within a multi-scale conservation planning framework would help to inform policy making in the region. As yet, however, there is little integrative research using indicators to track changes in ecosystems and human livelihoods in the region. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4ebe7e14bff61f54200be4c308526ec9395433e
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Regime shifts limit the predictability of land-system change (2014, background): “The historical dominance of shifting cultivation systems in Xishuangbanna is well known (Xu et al., 2005), as is the ongoing transition to rubber (Mann, 2009; Xu et al., 2014; Ziegler et al., 2009).”
- Developing indicators of economic value and biodiversity loss for rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna, southwest China: A case study from Menglun township (2014, background): “Even when the natural ruber price is high ($10/kg), plantations at elevations above 900 m (He nd Li, 2004; Xu et al., 2013 (this issue); Nguyen, 2013) or on a slope igher than 24◦ were not profitable, which is subset of negative NPV 7% of rubber area in Menglun township) of rubber plantations.”
- Current trends of rubber plantation expansion may threaten biodiversity and livelihoods (2015, methodology): “…we further gathered high-resolution rubber plantation maps for Xishuangbanna, China for four time intervals: four Landsat TM/ ETM images from 1988, 1992, 2002 and 2006 (spatial resolution c. 30 m), and 48 RapidEye images of level 3A captured in 2010 (spatial resolution c. 5 m) (Xu et al., 2014).”
- Systemic perspectives on scaling agricultural innovations. A review (2016, background): “For example, rubber cultivation was seen as a way out of poverty in Southwest China, but, when it eventually covered one-third of the landscape, environmental degradation became dramatic (Xu et al. 2014; Ziegler et al. 2009) (Fig.”