The dynamics and consequences of land system change have always been one of the central themes of global change research. As one of the most important research components in the sustainable development strategy, land system change has received much attention from the international community. With the development of research on land use change and the Global Land Project, researchers have increasingly realized the close relationships between natural environmental evolution, terrestrial ecosystem processes, human production activities and the dynamics of land system change. In this sense, it is of importance to explore the interactions and associations among various factors in the land system from a systematic perspective to recognize the causes and effects of land system change. Simulation of the dynamics and consequences of land system change has been a breakthrough point and destination in research on land system change. As an interdisciplinary research field, the simulation of the dynamics and consequences of land system change involves a wide range of disciplines, and it is necessary to consider the spatial and temporal scales in the simulation process. 

A monograph by Prof. DENG Xiangzheng, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Modeling the Dynamics and Consequences of Land System Change, is recently published by the Springer and the Higher Education Press and released globally. This monograph depicts the principles and methods for simulating dynamic change in regional land systems and consequent effects and illustrates a three-tier modeling approach involving the Computable General Equilibrium of Land Use Change (CGELUC), Dynamics of Land Systems (DLS) and Estimation System for Land Productivity (ESLP) models to solve the critical technical difficulties in the research field of land change science. The three-tier architecture model illustrated in this monograph is an effective tool which explicitly simulates the dynamics and consequences of regional land system change. It can be assumed that the three-tier architecture model will be used widely with the support of high accuracy and spatial-temporal resolution data available.