These threats are related to urban sprawl,
deforestation, food production, the erosion of biodiversity; and
affect the provision of marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem
services, climate change mitigation, and the containment of
infectious diseases (Foley et al., 2005). Land-use studies, therefore,
are central to the sustainable development agenda and have been
facilitated by rapid progress in geospatial technologies. However,
understanding the coupled social–ecological systems in which
land-use changes are occurring ideally requires an integration
of expert knowledge (technocratic or scientific) with other nonscientific
knowledge (Rindfuss et al., 2004). The latter is usually
observation-based empirical knowledge held by specific groups o