Global change and the intensification of agriculture in the tropics

Bridging understanding of local environmental change with regional and global patterns of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) remains a key goal and challenge for our understanding of global environmental change. This meta-analysis attempts to bridge local and regional scales of LUCC by demonstrating the ways in which previously published case studies can be compared and used for a broader regional synthesis in the tropics. In addition to providing results from a meta-analysis, this paper suggests ways to make future case studies more widely comparable. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.