Land | EPFL Graph Search

Land, also known as dry land, ground, or earth, is the solid terrestrial surface of Earth not submerged by the ocean or another body of water. It makes up 29.2% of Earth's surface and includes all continents and islands. Earth's land surface is almost entirely covered by regolith, a layer of rock, soil, and minerals that forms the outer part of the crust. Land plays important roles in Earth's climate system, being involved in the carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, and water cycle. One third of land is covered in trees, another third is used for agriculture, and one tenth is covered in permanent snow and glaciers. The remainder consists of desert, savannah, and prairie. Land terrain varies greatly, consisting of mountains, deserts, plains, plateaus, glaciers, and other landforms. In physical geology, the land is divided into two major categories: Mountain ranges and relatively flat interiors called cratons. Both form over millions of years through plate tectonics. Streams – a major part of

Renewable Land: Planning the Evolution of Logistic Areas

Gloria Serra Coch

Land is the support of life and the generator of energy cycles in the planet, also being a finite resource. The first consequence of urban population growth and build environment expansion is land consumption. Present strategies reduce this expenditure, generally by attenuating dispersive growth, favouring compact city models and reusing built inventory. From current urban land, a noteworthy percentage is assigned for logistic use and this proportion is increasing as a consequence of delocalized economies. However, planning strategies seem to overlook these areas when addressing the mentioned issues. The common localization of these zones, well-connected and placed in the influence area of a city, gives them a high probability to be absorbed by the mixed-use urban tissue during the process of city growth. Planning urban logistic land considering its possible future conversion into mixed-use urban fabric becomes a pressing concern. The study analyses industrial areas that have been transformed into mixed-use urban tissue to, subsequently, stablishing a correlation between them and current logistic zones. In the case of logistic areas, special attention should be paid to transportation infrastructures, legislation and land-use organization, ecosystem preservation and mixed-use progressive introduction. The objective is to foster the planning of logistic land considering its potential future re-use and transformation into mixed-use urban tissue with low energy costs.

UNIV POLITECNICA CATALUNYA2021

A game-theoretical model of deforestation in human-environment relationships

Antonio Rodrigues

We studied a two-person game regarding deforestation in human–environment relationships. Each landowner manages a single land parcel where the state of land-use is forested, agricultural, or abandoned. The landowner has two strategies available: forest conservation and deforestation. The choice of deforestation provides a high return to the landowner, but it degrades the forest ecosystem services produced on a neighboring land parcel managed by a different landowner. Given spatial interactions between the two landowners, each landowner decides which strategy to choose by comparing the expected discounted utility of each strategy. Expected discounted utility is determined by taking into account the current and future utilities to be received, according to the state transition on the two land parcels. The state transition is described by a Markov chain that incorporates a landowner's choice about whether to deforest and the dynamics of agricultural abandonment and forest regeneration. By considering a stationary distribution of the Markov chain for land-use transitions, we derive explicit conditions for Nash equilibrium. We found that a slow regeneration of forests favors mutual cooperation (forest conservation). As the forest regenerates faster, mutual cooperation transforms to double Nash equilibria (mutual cooperation and mutual defection), and finally mutual defection (deforestation) leads to a unique Nash equilibrium. Two different types of social dilemma emerge in our deforestation game. The stag-hunt dilemma is most likely to occur under an unsustainable resource supply, where forest regenerates extremely slowly but agricultural abandonment happens quite rapidly. In contrast, the prisoner's dilemma is likely under a persistent or circulating supply of resources, where forest regenerates rapidly and agricultural abandonment occurs slowly or rapidly. These results show how humans and the environment mutually shape the dilemma structure in forest management, implying that solutions to dilemmas depend on environmental properties.

2009

Numerical Simulation of Soil Moisture and Heat Transfer for Land-Atmosphere Exchange

Florian Habermacher

The exchange of moisture and heat between the land and the atmosphere is an area of major uncertainty in different fields of environmental research including global problems such as climate change and more local and regional studies such as the influence of changes of the landscape on the microclimate. With the goal of developing an improved representation of land-atmosphere exchange, a numerical soil moisture and heat (NSSMH) transfer model was developed that uses atmospheric conditions as the primary forcing to calculate heat fluxes between the soil and the overlying air. The model calculates vapor and liquid moisture transport as well as sensible heat transfer. In several tests the code was shown to be a useful tool for understanding the nature of the surface exchange phenomena. Among these, it was shown that during the afternoon when the soil surface is being heated by the sun, water vapor inside the soil column is flowing both downwards and upwards.

2006

A game-theoretical model of deforestation in human-environment relationships

Antonio Rodrigues

2009