Land cover change and socioecological influences on terrestrial carbon production in an agroecosystem

Context This study evaluated the contributions of land cover and land use change (LCLUC) and land management to landscape carbon production through a complex cause-effect path analysis of socioecological latent variables. Socioecological contributions to landscape carbon production are essential in landscape analysis, as their processes are both independent and interactive. Objectives We quantify the coherencies of social, economic, and environmental variables and their impact on net primary production (NPP) in an agroecosystem landscape. We ask whether LCLUC contributed to increased NPP and if land management and LCLUC play a more significant role than abiotic stressors on NPP. Methods We applied a socio-environmental system framework to evaluate anthropogenic and environmental processes in the Kalamazoo River Watershed in southwest Michigan, USA from 1987 to 2017. Structural composition and functional contribution to NPP were evaluated by land cover type. We synthesized remote sensing, gridded climate, social and biophysical data in a principal component analysis (PCA) to inform a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM). Results Land cover type contributed to anthropogenic processes. Cropland contributed to Land Management, forest and water contributed to Land Cover Change, and urban to the Regional Development construct. Anthropogenic activities contributed more to NPP than abiotic processes. Attitudes of environmental stewardship strongly related to land use change likelihood. Conclusions We disentangled anthropogenic and climatic changes’ contributions to terrestrial carbon production and the societal ties to potential carbon sequestration. No single landscape metric is suitable for all study areas; however, this framework is useful for a landscape-scale analysis of socio-environmental processes.