Linking Land Use Models to Land Cover for Generating Landscape Scenarios

Abstract:

Land use models and scenarios are important tools for evaluating the potential environmental and ecological impacts of land use policies and decisions. To be useful, such tools should both account for underlying social drivers of land use change and provide information on the physical landscape changes (i.e., land cover) brought about by land use change. This presentation summarizes work on how land use and land cover change are linked in the Upper Midwest, and various approaches to spatial modeling and simulation of these changes for the development of scenarios. The talk deals with a variety of methodological issues associated with remote sensing, mapping, and GIS-based representation and modeling of land use and cover.