Abstract
Abstract. In order to identify drivers of land use / land cover change (LUCC), the rate of change is often compared with environmental and socio-economic variables such as slope, soil suitability or population density. Socio-economic information is obtained from census data which are collected for individual households but are commonly presented in aggregate on the basis of geographical units as municipalities. However, a common problem, known as the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), is that the results of statistical analysis are not independent of the scale and the spatial configuration of the units used to aggregate the information. In this article, we evaluate how strong MAUP effects are for a study on the deforestation drivers in Mexico at municipality level. This was done by taking socio-economic variables from the 2010 Census of Mexico along with environmental variables and the rate of deforestation. As population census is given for each human settlement and environmental variables are obtained from high resolution spatial database, it was possible to aggregate the information using spatial units (”pseudo municipalities”) with different sizes in order to observe the effect of scale and aggregation on the values of bivariate correlations (Pearsons r) between pairs of variables. We found that MAUP produces variations in the results, and we observed some variable pairs and some configurations of the spatial units where the effect was substantial.
Highlights
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is significant to a large range of aspects related to global environmental change and has received increasing attention from scientists and decision makers
Socio-economic information is obtained from census data which are collected for individual households but are commonly presented in aggregates on the basis of geographical units such as counties, municipalities or states
A common problem is that the results of statistical analysis are dependent of the scale and the spatial configuration of the units used to aggregate the information
Summary
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is significant to a large range of aspects related to global environmental change and has received increasing attention from scientists and decision makers. Multidate images are classified in order to monitor LUCC and spatial variables, expected to be the drivers of changes, are integrated in a GIS database. The rate of change (e.g. rate of deforestation) is often compared with environmental and socio-economic variables such as slope, soil suitability or population density in order to identify and assess the effects of the drivers by means of a statistical index. A common problem is that the results of statistical analysis are dependent of the scale and the spatial configuration of the units used to aggregate the information. The scale problem is the variation in results observed when the data are aggregated into sets of increasingly larger units of analysis. The zoning problem is related to the variations in results observed when the analysis is done using the same number of alternative units. Some works indicate that the MAUP can cause variations of the correlations from -1 to +1 by judicious placement of zone boundaries
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