Land-use/land-cover change: Challenges for geographers

The expertise and knowledge accumulated by geographers in this area are now in urgent demand by the international scientific and policy communities to illuminate key issues of global environmental change. Geographers interested in the use and transformation of the land today have the opportunity to apply their insights in novel and valuable ways. At the same time, they face the challenge of communicating with a new audience whose interests and criteria of significance may differ from the ones to which they are accustomed. In particular, geographer's fondness for stressing the complexity of patterns and processes and the distinctiveness of each study area can be most useful, but must come to terms with countervailing needs for abstraction and generalization.