This book provides a detailed overview of the concepts, techniques, applications, and methodological approaches involved in land use and cover change (LUCC) modeling, also known simply as land change modeling. More than 40 international experts in this field have participated in this book, which illustrates recent advances in LUCC modeling with examples from North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe. Given the broad range of geomatic approaches available, it helps readers select the approach that best meets their needs. The book is structured into five parts preceded by a foreword written by Roger White and a general introduction. Part I consists of four chapters, each of which focuses on a specific stage in the modeling process: calibration, simulation, validation, and scenarios. It presents and explains the fundamental ideas and concepts underlying LUCC modeling. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of the selected software packages, practically applied in various case studies in Part II and Part III. Part II discusses recently proposed methodological developments that have enhanced modeling procedures and results while Part III offers case studies as well as interesting, innovative methodological proposals. Part IV revises different fundamental techniques used in LUCC modeling and finally Part V describes the best-known software packages used in the applications presented in Parts II and III.

People are constantly changing the land surface through construction, agriculture, energy production, and other activities. Changes both in how land is used by people (land use) and in the vegetation, rock, buildings, and other physical material that cover the Earth's surface (land cover) can be described and future land change can be projected using land-change models (LCMs). LCMs are a key means for understanding how humans are reshaping the Earth's surface in the past and present, for forecasting future landscape conditions, and for developing policies to manage our use of resources and the environment at scales ranging from an individual parcel of land in a city to vast expanses of forests around the world. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements describes various LCM approaches, suggests guidance for their appropriate application, and makes recommendations to improve the integration of observation strategies into the models. This report provides a summary and evaluation of several modeling approaches, and their theoretical and empirical underpinnings, relative to complex land-change dynamics and processes, and identifies several opportunities for further advancing the science, data, and cyberinfrastructure involved in the LCM enterprise. Because of the numerous models available, the report focuses on describing the categories of approaches used along with selected examples, rather than providing a review of specific models. Additionally, because all modeling approaches have relative strengths and weaknesses, the report compares these relative to different purposes. Advancing Land Change Modeling's recommendations for assessment of future data and research needs will enable model outputs to better assist the science, policy, and decisionsupport communities.

The thesis is an original and novel contribution to land use/land cover change analysis using methods of geosimulation and agent-based modeling. The author implements several traditional methodologies of land use change by means of remote sensing and GIS techniques. An Agent-Based Model was developed in order to simulate land use change in the Tehran metropolitan area, comparing the outcomes of each particular methodology. All methods are compared, and advantages and disadvantages discussed.

Modelling environmental dynamics is critical to understanding and predicting the evolution of the environment in response to the large number of influences including urbanisation, climate change and deforestation. Simulation and modelling provide support for decision making in environmental management. The first chapter introduces terminology and provides an overview of methodological modelling approaches which may be applied to environmental and complex dynamics. Based on this introduction this book illustrates various models applied to a large variety of themes: deforestation in tropical regions, fire risk, natural reforestation in European mountains, agriculture, biodiversity, urbanism, climate change and land management for decision support, etc. These case studies, provided by a large international spectrum of researchers and presented in a uniform structure, focus particularly on methods and model validation so that this book is not only aimed at researchers and graduates but also at professionals.

This volume is a synthesis of the NASA funded work under the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program. Hundreds of scientists have worked for the past eight years to understand one of the most important forces that is changing our planet-human impacts on land cover, that is land use. Its contributions span the natural and the social sciences, and apply state-of-the-art techniques for understanding the earth: satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems, modeling, and advanced computing. It brings together detailed case studies, regional analyses, and globally scaled mapping efforts. This is the most organized effort made to understand the dominant force that has been responsible for changing the Earth’s biosphere. Audience: This publication will be of interest to students, scientists, and policy makers. This volume includes a CD-ROM containing full color images of a selection of illustrations which are printed in black-and-white in the book.

Multicriteria Evaluation (MCE) has been used as a land suitability method and is often coupled with Cellular Automata (CA) for land-use and urban growth modeling. MCE, however, exhibits limitations including data loss and insufficient logical requirements. The Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) is an alternative approach that can overcome these issues. LSP is a soft computing system evaluation method efficient in nonlinear aggregation with flexible logic requirements. The main objective of this research study was to develop an integrated LSP and geographic information system (GIS) methodology for modeling land-use change. Moreover, the LSP method was further integrated into a CA to model urban growth. The LSP methodology was tested with geospatial datasets of coastal BC, Canada and several scenarios of future land-use change were generated. This research contributes to the field of spatio-temporal modeling with a novel integration of LSP, GIS, and CA for land-use suitability analysis and modeling.

The chapters in this book present state-of-the-art geomatics technologies applied in global environmental studies. This text provides the latest research findings and delivers complete references to related publications. This book will motivate the undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and practitioners to better understand the environmental changes with informed solutions. Global Change studies are increasingly considered a vital source of information to understand the Earth Environment, especially in the framework of human-induced, climate change and land use transformation. Satellite Earth Observing systems and geomatics technologies provide a unique tool to monitor and model the changes, respectively. While the range of applications and innovative techniques are always increasing, this book provides a summary of key study cases where satellite data offers critical information to understand the usefulness of the geomatics technologies and global environmental issues. Geomatics technologies provide powerful tools to model and analyze the effects of those global environmental changes towards minimizing their adverse impacts on human health and the environment.