Projecting Shifts in Human and Ecological Zones
Abstract
As the human population approaches 7.7 billion, Earth's capacity to support human life is stretched. There are declining opportunities for the expansion of human agriculture and settlements into new places. Additionally, there is an expected increase in the motivation for local people to defend land that currently supports the production of essential food and water. As climate non-stationarity continues, changes in the productivity of local food and water supply could result in starvation or surpluses. This study addresses the following question regarding the future potential of land resources to support local populations with food and water: How might existing ecological and anthropogenic biomes shift over the twenty-first century? Recent historic ecological and anthropogenic biome maps are statistically correlated with recent historic climate to generate models. These are then applied to anticipated future climates to generate future biome and anthrome maps. These maps are evaluated and summarized to suggest how the future climate might change and affect land use patterns. This analysis is constrained to the area of Central America over the course of the twenty-first century based on the results of recent climate models. However, it is a goal of the authors that the methods developed in this work can be applied to other regions of the world.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 13, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1080494
Entities
People
- Angela M. Rhodes
- James D. Westervelt
- Jeanne M. Roningen
- Kayla A. Cotterman
Organizations
- Engineer Research and Development Center