A Short Presentation of the Actor, Policy, and Land Use Simulator (APoLUS)

Abstract

Land use change is a social-environmental process strongly influenced by the dynamic behaviour of key actors (e.g. land managers, regulators, policy makers). Existing frameworks for modelling land use change tend to under-represent the role of these actors, which makes it difficult to study strongly actor-driven land change processes, like renewable energy development or intensive agriculture. In this chapter we present the Actor, Policy and Land Use Simulator (APoLUS) model, a free-and-open-source (FOSS) geographical model for the R environment which allows the dynamic interaction of actors to be integrated with Neighbourhood (N), Accessibility (A), Suitability (S) and Zoning (Z) parameters found in a conventional cellular automata-based geographical model. The inclusion of actor dynamics in APoLUS makes it easier to model the effect of policy interventions on land use change and leads to more realistic simulation of land change processes than in non actor-driven models.