Disclaimer: this page is work in progress. To be extended….    

Possible topics:

1. How can we use/apply AI to shine a light on the past? Can we use AI to generate a plausible scenario of past land change. IT can be seen as reversed engineering; what is the ‘best plausible’ historical land use scenario, which generates the ‘correct’ land use emissions and the resulting GHG concentrations (to equal the independent ice cores measurements).
2. How can we implement (spatially explicit) data on historical settlements, cities, towns in order to improve the HYDE urban/rural population estimates and re-design the built-up area calculation method.
3. Construct and design global historical shifting cultivation patterns. There is very little known about shifting cultivation, especially for the past. How much was it practiced and where in the world?
4. Create a new, or connect an existing LU emissions model to HYDE land change patterns and compute historical LU emissions. Ideally, a simple global carbon cycle model would be great (with LU change as input, but also includes peat formation, ocean processes (coral growth) leading to an atmospheric composition and CO2 concentration over the Holocene.

Feel free to create your own topic related to land change and contact me if you want to do a master thesis! c.g.m.kleingoldewijk@uu.nl