Land-change science has emerged as a foundational element of global environment change and sustainability science. It seeks to understand the human and environment dynamics that give rise to changed land uses and covers, not only in terms of their type and magnitude but their location as well. This focus requires the integration of social, natural, and geographical information sciences. Each of these broad research communities has developed different ways to enter the land-change problem, each with different means of treating the locational specificity of the critical variables, such as linking the land manager to the parcel being managed. The resulting integration encounters various data, methodological, and analytical problems, especially those concerning aggregation and inference, land-use pixel links, data and measurement, and remote sensing analysis. Here, these integration problems, which hinder comprehensive understanding and theory development, are addressed. Their recognition and resolution are required for the sustained development of land-change science.

Rubber plantations are expanding rapidly throughout montane mainland Southeast Asia (1–3). More than 500,000 ha may have been converted already in the uplands of China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar (see the figure, panel A). By 2050, the area of land dedicated to rubber and other diversified farming systems could more than double or triple, largely by replacing lands now occupied by evergreen broadleaf trees and swidden-related secondary vegetation (2). What are the environmental consequences of this conversion of vast landscapes to rubber?