Thematic

Population Projections

Interdisciplinary studies that draw on long-term, global population projections often make limited use of projection results, due at least in part to the historically opaque nature of the projection process. We present a guide to such projections, aimed at researchers and educators who would benefit from putting them to greater use. Drawing on new practices and new thinking on uncertainty, methodology, and the likely future courses of fertility and life expectancy, we discuss who makes projections and how, and the key assumptions upon which they are based. We also compare methodology and recent results from prominent institutions and provide a guide to other sources of demographic information, pointers to projection results, and an entry point to key literature in the field.

Land-Use and Land-Cover Change

Humans have been altering land cover since pre-history through the use of fire to flush out game and, since the advent of plant and animal domestication, through the clearance of patches of land for agriculture and livestock. In the past two centuries the impact of human activities on the land has grown enormously, altering entire landscapes, and ultimately impacting the earth's nutrient and hydrological cycles as well as climate. Land-use and land-cover changes are local and place specific, occurring incrementally in ways that often escape our attention. Yet, collectively, they add up to one of the most important facets of global environmental change. This thematic guide provides an introduction to these changes, and walks the readers through important topics in land use and land cover change research: deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, land cover and the water cycle, land cover and the carbon cycle, and urbanization.

Night-time Light Remote Sensing and its Applications

Night-time light imagery stands unique amongst remote sensing data sources as it offers a uniquely ‘human’ view of the Earth's surface. The presence of lighting across the globe is almost entirely due to some form of human activity be it settlements, shipping fleets, gas flaring or fires associated with swidden agriculture. This extensively illustrated guide introduces users to the types of night-time light data available, its characteristics and limitations. It details the distinguishing features of the stable lights, radiance calibrated and time series Average DN datasets.

Social Science Applications of Remote Sensing

Remote sensing has traditionally been the province of Earth scientists and the national security community. Early civilian satellite instruments were designed largely to meet the needs of weather forecasting, earth systems science and natural resource management. Social science applications were, generally speaking, not even considered. However, since the late 1980s, this began to change as a number of social scientists began to apply remote sensing imagery to understand the underlying social processes behind diverse phenomena such as deforestation, desertification, and urbanization. Since that time there has been a dramatic increase in the quantity and breadth of research that can be broadly categorized under the umbrella of "social science," with newer applications in the fields of archaeology, demography, and human health and epidemiology.