People and Pixels Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science (1998) / Chapter Skim
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3 'Socializing the Pixel' and 'Pixelizing the Social' in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change
3 'Socializing the Pixel' and 'Pixelizing the Social' in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change
Pages 51-69
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From page 51... ...
Remote sensing both data and image processing and analysis through geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly affecting the research agendas on global environmental change, as evidenced by various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
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From page 52... ...
Turner et al., 1995; Woodcock and Strahler,1987~.3 It is not our purpose to review this work here. It is sufficient to note that the majority of this work leads up to and has significant implications for the notion of socializing and pixelizing in land-use and land-cover change research.
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From page 53... ...
Changes in the mosaics or composite patterns of these land covers appeared to signal general trajectories of the socioeconomic health and environmental sustainability of the production system at the village or village cluster level, although the sample was not sufficient to determine the statistical significance of this inference. Nevertheless, work by Moran and colleagues (1994; Mausel et al., 1993)
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From page 54... ...
Such approaches have been used successfully for estimating change in phenomena involving processes that conform to the stationarity principle, where previous land uses are a proxy for stationary human behavior (Usher, 1981~. These approaches would seem appropriate for cases involving low levels of chronic change, as in the case of subsistence-driven cultivation in forest regions that is associated with natural population growth or decline.
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From page 55... ...
By calculating the transition probability of each cell in the land-cover maps as a function of existing land covers in the neighborhood of that cell, a spatial component was added to the transition probabilities. Multinomial logistic regressions were used to link the spatially explicit actual land-use transitions to biophysical, distance, and socioeconomic variables.
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From page 56... ...
This result suggests that further exploration of the socialized Markovian approach may be useful, especially with superior data and techniques accounting for time lags and shocks to land-conversion dynamics. PIXELIZING THE SOCIAL A paucity of spatially explicit data has constrained spatial modeling of human behavior and social structures, especially beyond the field of geography, and fostered modeling approaches that abstract from the essential spatial nature of the problem.
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From page 57... ...
There are, however, additional potential gains to be realized from using spatial data. Analyzing a problem that is essentially location based without geographically coded data is analogous to analyzing a time-series problem without knowing the chronological order of the observations.5 The further development of statistical techniques for estimating spatially explicit models using remotely sensed data is essential, as articulated for spatial econometrics by Bockstael (1996~.
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From page 58... ...
The effort links remotely sensed data on land use and land cover with a variety of spatially explicit socioeconomic and physical data, as well as with separate ecological and economic models that are constructed so that the outputs of each can be easily used as inputs to the other. Each model employs a landscape perspective that captures the spatial and temporal distributions of the services and functions of the natural system and human-related phenomena, such as surrounding land-use patterns and population distributions.
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From page 59... ...
Whether the information gained by using spatial econometric techniques vastly improves the estimation is still an empirical issue. The initial spatial econometric modeling work with the Patuxent model demonstrates, however, the potential improvements in explaining and predicting land values (Geoghegan and Bockstael, 1995~.
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From page 60... ...
60 ~ low ; medium '~SOCIALIZING THE PIXEL', AND ``PIXELIZING THE SOCIALS FIGURE 3-1 Predicted probability of development: Anne Arundel, Calvert7 Charles, and Prince George's counties, Maryland.
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From page 61... ...
SCALAR DYNAMICS AND PATH DEPENDENCE In the Patuxent, SYPR, and other analyses, land covers are modeled as a function of biophysical and socioeconomic variables and their interactions. The critical variables change in incidence and importance, however, through time and across scales of analysis (Sanderson and Pritchard, 1993~.
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From page 62... ...
, not on current values of driving forces alone. A path-dependent system may exhibit several properties that must be considered in land-use and land-cover change assessments (Arthur, 1989~: varying predictability (unpredictability is followed by high predictability as the system is "locked ink; nonergodicity (historical events are not averaged away, and small perturbations may significantly influence long-run development)
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From page 63... ...
Historical accident may explain as much as driving forces do. The other set of processes leading to path dependency is investment rigiditiessunk costs, infrastructure development, landesque capital such as field drains and terraces, institutional evolution that constrain and shape future development possibilities.
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From page 64... ...
Indicators of social or human-environment conditions in remotely sensed data, especially satellite imagery, are likely to be found in complex and composite patterns, requiring analytical techniques and tools to register. Since these patterns are generated by the unfolding of many processes in place, as in the Nepalese case, they are likely to be applicable only at the regional level.
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From page 65... ...
-International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) core project on Land-Use/ Cover Change (LUCC)
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From page 66... ...
7 These values are predicated on such attributes as location, distances to features in the landscape, view, and surrounding landscape amenities and neighboring land uses, where the land use is residential or another developed use. In the case of residential land values, individuals are modeled to trade off reduced commuting distance to major employment centers for lot size, as well as neighborhood and environmental amenities.
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From page 67... ...
Paper presented to the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting, Washington, D.C., January 1995. 1997 The Value of Open Spaces for Residential Land Prices and Land Use Change.
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From page 68... ...
Turner II 1995 The use and limits of remote sensing for analyzing environmental and social change in the Himalayan middle mountains of Nepal. Global Environmental Change 5:367-380.
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From page 69... ...
Turner II, B.L. 1991 Thoughts on linking the physical and human sciences in the study of global environmental change.
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