From land-use/land-cover to land system science : This article belongs to Ambio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: Agricultural land use

Before transitioning to questions of sustainability, international research agendas addressing the Anthropocene focused on global environmental change, or the alterations in the structure and functioning of the earth system affected by human activity. Research focusing on terrestrial ecology recognized that projecting such changes into the future required an understanding of social-environment systems (SESs). Terrestrial ecological research, therefore, needed integration with social science research addressing the causes and projections of land uses—the purpose to which humankind employs the earth’s surface—and land cover— a principal link to the biophysical subsystem. This integration generated the Land-Use and Land-Cover (LUCC)program on which the Turner et al. (1994) Ambio article was based.