Land-Use Change And Analysis System - GeoDesign Knowledge Portal

Land-Use Change And Analysis System
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System designed to simulate land use change in two geographic regions.

Accepts Data Of Process Types

LUCAS

Planning And Decision Process Phases/Steps Served

LUCAS is a multidisciplinary simulation framework for investigating the impact of land-use management policies (Berry et al., 1996). LUCAS has been used to support regional assessments of land-use change patterns as a function of social choices and regulatory approaches (Wear et al., 1996). LUCAS can be used to compare the effects of alternative ecosystem management strategies that could be implemented over any sized eco-region. These alternatives could be evaluated based on any number of social choice assumptions ascribed to private landowners (Wear et al., 1996). LUCAS could also be used to address the effects of land cover changes on natural resource supplies and local incomes. LUCAS has been applied to the Little Tennessee River basin in western North Carolina and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. The map layers used were derived from remotely-sensed images, census and ownership maps, topographical maps, and outputs from econometric models. These map layers are stored, displayed, and analyzed using a public-domain Geographic Information System (GIS). Simulations using LUCAS generate new maps of land cover representing the amount of land-cover change so that issues such as biodiversity conservation, assessing the importance of landscape elements to meet conservation goals, and long-term landscape integrity can be addressed.

Accepts Data Of Process Types

Berry, M. W.; Flamm, R. O.; Hazen, B. C.; MacIntyre, R. M.. 1996. The Land-use Change Analysis System (LUCAS) for evaluating landscape management decisions. IEEE Computational Science and Engineering 3:24–35.More, see web site

Cost

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lucas/ (No Longer Available)

Decision Problem Types Targeted

true

Planning And Decision Process Phases/Steps Served

UNIX

Sdsstool:Requiressoftware

Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS)

Planning And Decision Process Phases/Steps Served

Some Computer/GIS Programming Skills

Indicators Used

false

Contributor

Not Priced

Last Updated

Prototype Being Applied

Supports Analysis Of Interdisciplinary Interactions

National Commission On Science For Sustainable Forestry

Information Source

lucas-info@cs.utk.edu

Indicators Used

Sean Gordon

Model Type

Software Tools And Models - All

Spatial Decision Support Systems

General:Hascomment

Transition probabilities were estimated empirically as a function of the set of independent variables (i.e., the data layers listed above) by comparing land cover in each of three time intervals (1975–1980, 1980–1986, and 1986–1991) and by using a multinomial logic model (Wear and Flamm 1993, Turner et al. 1996).we selected species with diverse habitat requirements across a range of taxa (Table 1). The limitations of the landscape change model influenced our choice of species. The number of species was limited to eight for each watershed because of the complexity in discerning the consequences of landscape changes for even a small number of species.[1]