Transitions and Drivers of Land Use/Land Cover Change in Hawaiʻi: A Case Study of Maui

Abstract

This chapter assessed the drivers of land use/land cover change and describes observed transitions in Hawaiʻi (USA), using the island of Maui as a case study. Over the last half-century, Maui has experienced periods of intensive agriculture, rapid urban development, population migration, and environmental change. To better understand landscape-level change on Maui, this chapter compared the available land cover products and quantified the spatial transitions between them. Between 1976 and the early 2000s, all products showed that agricultural land cover declined significantly (losses of 46–63%), built-up area expanded (gains of 105–273%), and grassland and bare land cover also increased (gains of 113–196%, and 46–137%, respectively). These transitions reflected documented shifts in Maui land management and environmental change over the past 40 years, but poor Kappa scores (from 0.47 to 0.62) highlighted the spatial disagreement between the different classifications. Furthermore, when each classification was examined individually, only the NOAA Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) product adequately reflected the more recent changes of the last 10–20 years. Based on this assessment, the NOAA C-CAP product is the recommended existing tool for analyzing spatial change in Hawaiʻi. It was designed with ecosystems management and change detection in mind and is the only high-resolution, internally-consistent product that is updated at regular intervals. Newer high-resolution imagery and ancillary spatial data on the drivers of change will provide opportunities to refine existing products and generate more recent information for tracking land cover change in Hawaiʻi.