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Applying Occam's razor to global agricultural land use change

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Author

  • Kerstin Engstrom
  • Mark D. A. Rounsevell
  • Dave Murray-Rust
  • Catherine Hardacre
  • Peter Alexander
  • Xufeng Cui
  • Paul I. Palmer
  • Almut Arneth

Summary, in English

We present a parsimonious agricultural land-use model that is designed to replicate global land-use change while allowing the exploration of uncertainties in input parameters. At the global scale, the modelled uncertainty range of agricultural land-use change covers observed land-use change. Spatial patterns of cropland change at the country level are simulated less satisfactorily, but temporal trends of cropland change in large agricultural nations were replicated by the model. A variance-based global sensitivity analysis showed that uncertainties in the input parameters representing to consumption preferences are important for changes in global agricultural areas. However, uncertainties in technological change had the largest effect on cereal yields and changes in global agricultural area. Uncertainties related to technological change in developing countries were most important for modelling the extent of cropland. The performance of the model suggests that highly generalised representations of socioeconomic processes can be used to replicate global land-use change. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Publishing year

2016

Language

English

Pages

212-229

Publication/Series

Environmental Modelling & Software

Volume

75

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use

Keywords

  • Global agricultural land-use
  • Parsimonious models
  • Parameter
  • uncertainty
  • Sensitivity analysis
  • Cereal yields

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1364-8152