Development of Global Map on Human and Environment and Its Application to Habitability Assessment

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The latest IPCC report officially recognized that global warming is induced by human activities and that evidences were reported by a number of scientific articles. The report raised public awareness on the discussion on how to use Earth environmental resources on the sustainable basis. Typical examples are global food security issues, conflicts between bio-fuel production from crops and food production and water resource issues. Growing public concern is critical to the conservation of global earth environment, because the control of human activities is an ultimate countermeasure. More rigorous and quantitative discussion materials, however, are crucially important in policy makings and investment for improving environmental quality, in addition to the attractive visualization. Global map on Human and Environment is a platform visualizing how human production and habitation activities change the landscape and resource uses from the past, present to the future based on quantitative integrated simulation results. The achievements of this study is (1) development of a simulation model integrating land-use (agriculture and urban), human production-consumption activities and international trading activities, (2) automated calibration of the integrated model using a variety of observation and statistical data. It can help reduce time and labor of revising the model whenever new data are available. In addition, a methodology of mapping urban and human settlements and road network are developed using a large archive of global satellite imagery, to complement the existing human-associated global data. (3) Metadata schema is developed so that distributed global earth observation data and statistical data etc can be retrieved. (4) Finally, future land-use change scenarios are proved according to the climate change scenario provided by the latest IPCC report.