About this Research Topic

Background

The rate of climate change intensification will increase with growing emissions of greenhouse gases in the future. Regional terrestrial temperature increases differ in magnitude from global warming due to feedback processes. This has far-reaching consequences to our society especially for our ecosystems, agricultural food production, water availability, living habitat and electric power generation. Many future scenarios expect a key role for the land-use sector to stabilize temperature rise to 2 °C or less.

Anthropogenic changes in land use/cover can influence the lower atmosphere by modifying land surface properties that control the exchange of energy, water, and momentum, and thus affect the regional or local climate. Teleconnections are possible depending on the magnitude of land surface transformations. The strength of the land-atmosphere coupling is linked to the morphological characteristics of the land surface including vegetation and urban areas. Here, the species composition and distribution plays a crucial role with their transpiration and photosynthesis, reflection ability of radiation, and roughness. The scale and nature of land surface modifications affect those processes, but the quantification of these interactions is not resolved, and the strength of the impact is still debated. This fact limits decision-makers to modulate land management strategies at different scales in light of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

With the rapid development of monitoring, satellite remote sensing and climate modelling, this Research Topic aims to bring together novel observational and numerical modelling studies regarding the interaction between land cover and climate change at global and regional or local scales, from bed-rock to the upper atmosphere, in the past, present, and future. Studies about land surface processes of different complexity and the interactions between the surface and the atmosphere in regional climate or weather forecast models are welcome. The key scientific issue to be tackled is how biology and urban areas impact climate, and their feedback processes. The goal is to develop different land management strategies at different scales for decision-makers.

This Research Topic welcomes contributions in the form of Original Research articles and Review papers regarding land cover changes and their effects on climate as well as land use management policy, which is based on observations and numerical modelling. Topics include crossing scales to high-resolution applications that link numerical models to observational data.

The highlights of this Research Topic include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

1) Monitoring land cover changes from satellite remote sensing and ground-based approaches at a different temporal and spatial scale
2) Evaluations of newly available sensors, data, and new development of integrated approaches for monitoring of land cover and vegetation phenology
3) Model configuration and parametrization, including sensitivity to resolution, land surface and dynamics
4) Convection-permitting regional climate model studies, including urban areas, novel types of land use or energy meteorology
5) Process studies on planetary boundary over heterogeneous land use
6) Approaches for quantifying uncertainty at high resolution, including statistical methods
7) Weather extremes feedbacks with the Earth’s surface
8) Development of new policy for land management strategies at different scales in light of climate change mitigation and adaptation

Keywords: land use land cover changes, deforestation and afforestation, land-atmosphere interaction, land use management policy, climate change, climate modelling

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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