Concluding post: land cover change in South America

Dear Readers! 

I hope you have enjoyed this blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it!

South America is a large and diverse continent - and for the purpose of this blog I have mostly concentrated on its northern half, especially the Amazon area and immediate surrounding. I chose this focus due to the global significance of the Amazon rainforest in its share of terrestrial biodiversity, role in the hydrological and carbon cycle and global climate circulations. 

Through this blog, I tried to highlight the current land cover of South America and the pressures that exist on its conversion or amendment for human purposes. Posts discussed different ways in which forest resilience is interrupted or reduced, followed by a detailed assessment of the wider effects of land cover change with a special focus on the most dominant mode: rainforest to pasture conversion. The effects covered were the quite obvious reduction in biodiveristy, the two-fold impact on renewable surface water formation, the complexity of climatic effects (local, regional and global) and the role of forests and deforestation in the carbon cycle.

It is important to assess the way anthropogenic land-cover change is caused, reinforces and also interacts with the effects of global climatic change. Consequences are severe for both natural ecosystem health and the human populations within the suggested area - if I would continue this blog further, I would expand on the socio-economic perspective as well.

I believe that this blog topic has helped me manifest my understanding of the complex manner in which humans are morphing the planet, and has put this knowledge into the context of the 9 planetary boundaries. As shown throughout my blogging, quite interestingly, a spatially limited phenomenon such as land cover change in South America impacts the situation of the whole planet not only within the boundary of 'land-system change' but also in others. Those covered here were mainly influencing 'biogeochemical flows', 'biosphere integrity', 'climate change' and 'atmospheric aerosol loading'. Thus my topic felt well-chosen to highlight the tight interactions of entities within the Earth system contributing to 'Global Environmental Change'. 

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