Research frontiers in land use science

Land-use science provides critical advances for better understanding land use in light of global economic and environmental changes. The eminent importance of land-use science for global sustainability therefore attracts substantial attention of academia, media, and decision makers (Müller & Munroe, 2014; Rindfuss et al., 2008; Turner, Lambin, & Reenberg, 2007). The Journal of Land Use Science aims to broaden the scientific basis for better understanding complex land systems and, in that way, to contribute knowledge that allows steering land use toward more sustainable pathways. The Journal attempts to fulfill this mission by featuring scholarship stemming from geography, economics, sociology, forestry, environmental sciences, and other disciplines that have ‘land’ as a central theme in the study of coupled human–natural systems. This issue brings together an array ofmanuscripts that feature emerging research perspectives in landuse science, including contributions that advance the state-of-the-art in land-use science and pinpoint research gaps for future inquiry. We specifically invited contributions that shed light on terminology, the modeling of complex land-use systems, and substantiate understudied research issues that deem more attention from the land-use science community and will receive more priority from the Journal of Land Use Science in the future. The issue takes off with an article by Patrick Meyfroidt (2016) that, I believe, will become seminal reading for land-use scientists. Meyfroidt illuminates issues surrounding the terminology used in causal and quasi-causal analysis of land-use science. Land scientists often aim to provide causal explanations of the observed land-use outcomes, yet the theoretical foundations to establish causality and the terminology to explain underlying causes have long been a weak spot. The lack of theory and imprecise use of terminology have often reduced the scientific value, impaired the ability to compare results, and limited the policy relevance of land-use analyses. The review by Meyfroidt in this issue intelligibly fills this gap and provides a clear-cut and coherent basis for analyzing and interpreting the causes that lead to changes in behavior of complex land systems, characterized by feedbacks, nonlinearities, and path dependence. I particularly encourage readers to carefully investigate Table 1 in the review of Meyfroidt (2016) that contains, in condensed form, the long-awaited clarification of terminology and should, become standard knowledge of land-use scientists. Bringing land-use science closer to true causality, and being clear about the wording of the results of analysis, will improve the ability to generalize from findings and thus strengthen the significance of results for policy and management. Molly Brown (2016) examines interconnections between land use, environmental change, and the three dimensions of food security, that are food availability, access, and utilization. Her article sheds light on the ability of remote sensing data to support several aspects of the multifaceted dimensions of food security. She emphasizes that satellite remote sensing is crucial to understand resource availability, particularly in countries characterized in part by subsistence-oriented farming where agricultural production is essential to household-level food security, such as throughout large parts of Africa, as demonstrated by Brown’s empirical examples. Improved information on land-cover change in combination with data on spatially explicit nutritional status can help identify areas where vegetation changes influence nutrition through affecting ecosystem services provided by the land. Finally, Brown shows how monitoring vegetation growth can be linked to food availability and thus to identify consumption gaps. Her contribution vividly calls for more empirical research that integrate contemporary remote sensing with data on elements of food security. JOURNAL OF LAND USE SCIENCE, 2016 VOL. 11, NO. 6, 619–622 http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/1747423X.2016. 1242924