Determinants of land use/cover change in the Iberian Peninsula (1990-2012) at municipal level

Abstract

This work analyzes the determinants associated with main land use/cover changes in the Iberian Peninsula during the 1990-2012 period using a decision tree model. Our main objective is to identify broad-scale patterns that associate the characteristics of geographic areas with the dominant land use/cover change process based on CORINE Land Cover (Coordination of Information on the Environment) and defined in a previously published work. Biophysical, structural and socioeconomic variables were considered as potentially explanatory of the dominant change process at municipal scale. The resulting model allowed identification of a common pattern in Portugal and Spain (urbanization being highly associated to areas already densely populated in the previous period), but also some diverging ones. In particular, dominant trends in Portuguese territory appear to be highly determined by wildfire occurrence. In contrast, Spanish municipalities showed more diverse patterns, usually associated to biophysical determinants like average forest productivity or average terrain slope.