Towards integrated natural resource management in forest margins of the humid tropics: local action and global concerns

Land cover may be defined, simply, as anything that is on (or covers) the ground. Land cover may be observed using remote sensing tools. It has specific attributes, such as vegetation, carbon and nutrient storage, and forms a habitat for plants and animals. Thus grasslands, trees, forests, deserts, cropped fields and buildings are, depending on the scale of observation, all recognisable elements of land cover. Land use is an action performed on the land, by humans, in order to meet one or more objectives. In some cases the same words can describe both land cover and land use; pastures, for example, are both a cover and a type of land use. However, land use systems can also consist of a sequence of land cover types. For example, at different points in time, a patch of land that is part of a shifting cultivation system of land use can have as land cover a bare field, a cropped field, a bushy young fallow, a secondary forest or even an old-growth forest. Moreover, a specific example of land cover can be part of several land use systems; a 'cropped field' can be part of a permanent cropping system or part of a long cycle rotation or an example of any system in between these extremes

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