Land Tenure, Property Rights, and Land Cover and Land Use Change at Transboundary Sites in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor

Our overarching goal is to study the impact of land tenure form and security on land cover and land use change (LCLUC) and thus ecosystem services across political borders within the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) in Central America. The MBC is a Central American-wide initiative that began in 1990 to develop migratory corridors to conserve biodiversity and foster sustainable development. The success of the MBC in protecting biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services varies considerably across countries. While deforestation has slowed in some protected areas, major threats to the corridor system include the expansion of agricultural areas outside of parks and migration into parks. Land tenure and land tenure conflicts are often cited as a major driver of observed land use changes in the MBC, but little empirical evidence exists. This is true throughout the world: causal evidence on the direction of relationships among land tenure and LCLUC is limited by (1) conceptual confusion about how to define and measure tenure, (2) a lack of comparative assessments across countries, and (3) the empirical challenges of separating out the effects of land tenure from other drivers of LCLUC. The proposed research will address these gaps by integrating remote sensing science with an econometric analysis of the impact of land tenure form and security on LCLUC from the late 1980s to 2013 across five political borders in the MBC. We will use novel fusions of satellite imagery and socioeconomic data measured at fine- (< 5 m) and mediumresolution (30 m) scales. By focusing on transboundary sites, we can hold constant many of the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that can drive LCLUC, and focus on differences across borders in allocation and enforcement of property rights. Our integrated remote sensing-econometric analysis will include: (1) quantification of LCLUC and characterization of biodiversity habitat and carbon storage using remotely sensed data of differing spatial and temporal resolutions, including Landsat imagery and higher resolution data, and (2) estimation of econometric models to assess how changes in land tenure form and security across borders and time impacted observed LCLUC. In addition, the proposed research will evaluate how fine- versus medium-scale satellite and socioeconomic data impact the (1) quantification of ecosystem services, (2) mapping of land tenure, and (3) estimation of land use change models. This will allow tradeoffs across collecting fine- versus medium-scale data to be assessed, informing decisionmakers interested in accurately, but cost-effectively, mapping and monitoring land use changes. Our study is noteworthy for its explicit integration of remote sensing science and econometric analysis and the novel combination of fine- and medium- scale datasets. The key contribution of our proposed research will be the generation of new knowledge about the primary drivers of LCLUC. Thus, it pertains directly to this NRA’s goals of focusing on land cover and land use across political borders, explaining and attributing these differences to their primary causes, inclusion of a social science component, and fusion from various sources of Landsat-type data with coarser and /or higher resolution data. The proposed research substantially contributes to: (1) NASA’s LCLUC science goals and themes Drivers of Change, Ecosystems and Biodiversity Impacts and Detection and Monitoring of LCLUC; (2) international global programs such as NASA’s GOFC-GOLD and the IGBP/IHDP Global Land Project; and (3) addressing the Belmont Challenge of integration across the sciences.