Abstract
Abstract. Spatial patterns of land use change due to urbanization and its impact on the landscape are the subject of ongoing research. Urban growth scenario simulation is a powerful tool for exploring these impacts and empowering planners to make informed decisions. We present FUTURES (FUTure Urban – Regional Environment Simulation) – a patch-based, stochastic, multi-level land change modeling framework as a case showing how what was once a closed and inaccessible model benefited from integration with open source GIS.We will describe our motivation for releasing this project as open source and the advantages of integrating it with GRASS GIS, a free, libre and open source GIS and research platform for the geospatial domain. GRASS GIS provides efficient libraries for FUTURES model development as well as standard GIS tools and graphical user interface for model users. Releasing FUTURES as a GRASS GIS add-on simplifies the distribution of FUTURES across all main operating systems and ensures the maintainability of our project in the future. We will describe FUTURES integration into GRASS GIS and demonstrate its usage on a case study in Asheville, North Carolina. The developed dataset and tutorial for this case study enable researchers to experiment with the model, explore its potential or even modify the model for their applications.
Highlights
Population growth in cities worldwide drives changes in land use often negatively impacting the environments in which people live and undermining the resilience of local ecosystems
This new version of FUTURES streamlines data processing, provides opportunities to study urbanization on mega-regional scales, and allows for more reproducible research in the land change community. We demonstrate this new version of FUTURES with a case study of the Asheville metropolitan area in North Carolina, USA
To demonstrate how the new FUTURES framework can be used to simulate urban growth, we present a case study for Asheville metropolitan area located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the west of North Carolina, USA
Summary
Population growth in cities worldwide drives changes in land use often negatively impacting the environments in which people live and undermining the resilience of local ecosystems. The need to understand the trade-offs urban planners are facing gave rise to a number of different land change simulation models, which proved to be powerful tools for exploring alternative scenarios and their impacts on various aspects of human-environmental systems (Chaudhuri and Clarke, 2013, Verburg et al, 2002, Sohl et al, 2007, Waddell, 2002). The FUTURES model was successfully applied in several cases including a study of land development dynamics in the rapidly expanding metropolitan region of Charlotte, North Carolina (Meentemeyer et al, 2013) and an analysis of the impacts of urbanization on natural resources under different conservation strategies (Dorning et al, 2015). FUTURES was coupled with ecosystem services models to examine the impacts of projected urbanization and urban pattern on several ecosystem services and their trade-offs (Shoemaker, 2016, Pickard et al, in prep.)
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