The course “Human History and Land-Use and Land-Cover Change” is offered as part of the TIGP program jointly run by NTU and AS. This course is also available for students in the Department of Land Economics at NCCU. It was designed based on the research materials I gathered after completing my research on reconstructing Taiwan’s land cover change. The goal of the course is to let students understand the relationship between land surface changes and climate from the perspective of human exploration of Earth, and then realize the trajectory of human civilization from the perspective of climate change.
During the course, we will observe the impacts of past human activities on the Earth’s environment, which include the introduction to human civilization across different time and spatial scales, the relationship between vegetation and climate, the reconstruction of geological epochs and land cover, the impact of local land use changes on the global environment, the contributions of scientific advancements to reconstruct historical land cover.
The course is divided into the following four themes:
- The history of human exploration of the Earth
- Constructing an experimental land use change model
- Impact of local land use changes on the global environment
- Application of remote sensing technology in detecting land cover changes
The course will cover the development history of land use/cover change models and related core concepts and theories, including Cellular Automaton, von Thunen’s land economic theory, and Markov Chain. We will go the simple linear equations to construct the land-use land-cover change model, and students will learn how to simulate land-cover change. In the course, I plan to use northern Taiwan as a case study, simulating its past, present, and future (see Fig. 1). Finally, the course will introduce satellite observation data and demonstrate how to use satellite data to monitor current land cover conditions in real-time.
|
