Abstract
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important part of the global environmental change. This study predicted the future structure of land use/cover on the basis of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and an econometric model with the socioeconomic factors as the driving forces. The future spatial pattern of land use/cover in China was simulated with the Dynamics of Land System (DLS) under the Business as Usual scenario, Rapid Economic Growth scenario and Cooperate Environmental Sustainability scenario. The simulation results showed that the land use/land cover in China will change continually due to the human activities and climate change, and the spatial pattern of land use/cover will also change as time goes by. Besides, the spatial pattern of land cover in China under the three scenarios is consistent on the whole, but with some regional differences. Built-up area will increase rapidly under the three scenarios, while most land cover types will show a decreasing trend to different degrees under different scenarios. The simulation results can provide an underlying land surface data and reference to the methodology research on the prediction of LUCC.
Highlights
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important part of the global environmental change, which has always been the focus of academia [1]
The structural data of LUCC in China in the future were simulated on the basis of Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) combined with the econometric model according to the Business as Usual (BAU) scenario, Rapid Economic Growth (REG) scenario, and Cooperate Environmental Sustainability (CES) scenario
We simulated the changes of LUCC in China in the future using GCAM model combined with the econometric model under the three scenarios (Figure 2)
Summary
Land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important part of the global environmental change, which has always been the focus of academia [1]. The DLS model is capable of simulating the spatial dynamics of LUCC, and case studies indicate that it is an effective tool to simulate the process of land use change [11, 24]. One of the major issues to settle is that there is still no temporal data and the current research on the driving force of LUCC is only from simple perspectives; it is urgent to obtain the long-term temporal data of LUCC parameters To solve this problem, this study simulated the structural change of land use in China with the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and an econometric model with the socioeconomic factors as the driving forces. Thereafter the DLS model was used to forecast the future spatial pattern of LUCC in China, which can provide temporal underlying surface data for relevant researches
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