Abstract
Understanding the driving forces of land use/cover change (LUCC) is a requisite to mitigate and manage effects and consequences of LUCC. This study aims to analyze drivers of LUCC in New England, USA. It combines meta-study, GIS, and machine learning to identify the important factors of LUCC in the area. Firstly, we conducted a meta-study of the research on LUCC in the New England area and specifically focused on the driving forces analysis. The meta-analysis revealed that the LUCC studies in the research area were highly related with many other research topics, and population and economic factors were the most mentioned drivers of the LUCC. The drivers of LUCC in this study area for the past several decades were relatively well analyzed. However, the study of the main driving forces of recent LUCC is lacking. Then, the determinants of LUCC for the recent years were quantitatively assessed using the random forests (RF) model along with geospatial data processing. Two planning regions in Connecticut and one planning region in Massachusetts were selected to serve as the case study areas. Investigated variables included environmental and biophysical variables, location measures of infrastructure and existing land use, political variables, and demographic and social variables. These drivers were examined for their relations with LUCC processes. Their importance as driving forces was ranked by the RF method. The results show both consistency and inconsistency between the meta-analysis and the RF method. We found that this mixed method can enhance our understanding of driving forces of LUCC and improve the selection quality of important drivers for modeling LUCC. With more solid information, better land management advices for sustainable development may also be provided.
Highlights
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a main component of global environmental change, which is mainly an intended or unintended outcome of human activities
The study started with a meta-study to reveal the general information of LUCC in New England and focused on the driving forces analysis
Through combing geospatial analysis results from the meta-study and the random forests (RF) model, this mixed method provides a condensed analysis of driving forces of LUCC from both qualitative and quantitative data in the study area
Summary
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a main component of global environmental change, which is mainly an intended or unintended outcome of human activities. Identification of driving forces that cause the dominant LUCC is essential for establishing management strategies and policies to mitigate or prevent negative effects of LUCC or for predicting future changes using models [7]. Identification of driving forces that cause the dominant land use and land cover transitions will further help managers to establish policies that mitigate or prevent negative effects of LUCC. The driving forces of LUCC are usually a mix of anthropogenic (e.g., demographic, political, economic, technological, and cultural) and biophysical factors (e.g., climate, soil, and topography) with direct or indirect impacts. Climate as one of the important drivers of LUCC is difficult to detect and quantify in a short-term or in a local research, because of its long-term consequences and low resolution of climate data. The drivers of LUCC are recognized as important, the complex and diverse interactions among nature, economy, and social systems make them difficult to be identified and quantified
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