Visualizing research of land use land cover change

Abstract

Land use/cover change (LUCC) has emerged in the research agenda on global environmental change since the mid-1970s. Considerable progress has been made in LUCC related studies and these research efforts have generated numerous peer-reviewed papers. Because land use dynamics has also been identified as one of the grand challenges of the next generation in environmental sciences, it is important to understand the structure and development of the LUCC research activities. In this study, self-organizing map, a data mining tool that excels in presenting similarities of data based on data contents, is used to visualize the LUCC research activities. We analyze abstracts and introductions of the peer-review journal articles from selected journals. More than 600 articles with land use or land cover in their titles or keywords are included in the analysis. Keywords of the articles, representing different LUCC research topics, are compiled, and the frequencies of these keywords in the articles are counted. The results are presented in map-like displays to illustrate LUCC research activities. A total of eight main research clusters are identified and the research activities within each cluster are discussed.