Land Change Science and the STEPLand Framework: An Assessment of Its Progress

Pere Serra and Luca Salvati
Additional contact information
Pere Serra: Grumets Research Group, Departament of Geography, Building B, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain
Luca Salvati: Department of Methods and Models for Economics, Territory and Finance, Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome, Via del Castro Laurenziano 9, I-00161 Rome, Italy

Land, 2022, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-38

Abstract: This contribution assesses a new term that is proposed to be established within Land Change Science: Spatio-TEmporal Patterns of Land (‘STEPLand’). It refers to a specific workflow for analyzing land-use/land cover (LUC) patterns, identifying and modeling driving forces of LUC changes, assessing socio-environmental consequences, and contributing to defining future scenarios of land transformations. In this article, we define this framework based on a comprehensive meta-analysis of 250 selected articles published in international scientific journals from 2000 to 2019. The empirical results demonstrate that STEPLand is a consolidated protocol applied globally, and the large diversity of journals, disciplines, and countries involved shows that it is becoming ubiquitous. In this paper, the main characteristics of STEPLand are provided and discussed, demonstrating that the operational procedure can facilitate the interaction among researchers from different fields, and communication between researchers and policy makers.

Keywords: In-deep reading analysis; LUCC patterns; spatial modeling of driving forces; socio-environmental consequences; future scenarios (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/7/1065/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/7/1065/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:11:y:2022:i:7:p:1065-:d:861532

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().