Modeling Land-Use and Land-Cover Change

Abstract

The decade since the initiation of the Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC)project in 1995 (see Chap. 1) has witnessed considerable advancesin the field of modeling of land-use/cover change. The science planof the project indicated that the major task would be the developmentof a new generation of land-use/cover change models capable of simulatingthe major socioeconomic and biophysical driving forces of land-useand land-cover change. In addition, these models were supposed tobe able to handle interactions at several spatial and temporal scales.Recent publications indicate that the LUCC science community hassuccessfully met this challenge and a wide range of advanced models,aiming at different scales and research questions, is now available(Briassoulis 2000; Agarwal et al. 2001; Veldkamp and Lambin 2001;Parker et al. 2003; Nagendra et al. 2004; Veldkamp and Verburg 2004;Verburg et al. 2004b; Verburg and Veldkamp 2005). One of the mostimportant observations that can be made examining the range of availableland-use/ cover change models is the wide variety of approaches andconcepts underlying the models. This chapter intends to describethe variety of modeling approaches, discuss the strengths and weaknessesof current approaches and indicate the remaining challenges for theland-use science community. Not being able to discuss all individualmodels and approaches, we will focus on broad distinctions betweenapproaches and discuss how modelers have dealt with a number of importantaspects of the functioning of the landuse system. A land-use systemis understood here as a type of land use with interrelated determiningfactors with strong functional relations with each other (see Fig.1.2). These factors include a wide range of land-use influencingfactors than can be biophysical, economic, social, cultural, political,or institutional. The discussion of modeling approaches in this chapteris illustrated with examples of models and results from selectedresearch projects.