Modeling land use change in human-dominated landscapes: A case study of urbanization in an Indiana watershed.

摘要

Environmental changes within human-dominated landscapes are mainly resulted from shifts in land uses, which, in turn, are governed by human driving forces. Therefore, there is a need to understand socio-ecological interrelationships and the social processes of human land use. This study explores urbanization processes within a rural-urban watershed using a discrete choice model based on economic land use theory. Urbanization of agricultural land can be depicted as choices made by landowners when faced with urban land use opportunities. Discrete land use choice models were developed to examine factors contributing to urbanization decisions. Factors including accessibility, land quality, regional and local development trends, land use regulations, and land ownership characteristics were examined. The parameters of the specified models are statistically significant, suggesting that there is a relationship between urbanization probability of agricultural land and the observed explanatory variables.; The land use choice model was then used to predict urbanization probabilities of the remaining agricultural lands, and to simulate future urbanization patterns and their impacts on forests, wetlands, agricultural production, and surface-water run-off under different land use control scenarios. Results of simulations suggest that different land use control strategies will result in different urbanization patterns and urbanization impacts. Treating all parcels as having equal urbanization probabilities will erroneously predict urbanization patterns and their impacts. Faster or slower regional urban growth does not significantly affect the relationships between urbanization and its impacts. However, because different land parcels have different land characteristics as well as urbanization probabilities, urbanization impacts are not always constantly proportional to the extent of urbanization.; This study demonstrated that land use choice models can serve as an interface between ecological and socioeconomic studies. Social and ecological factors and their interactions can be integrated into land use choice model to explain human land use decisions, and to evaluate their effects on land use impacts. The simulation approach used in this study is practical, and is useful in comparing the effects of different land use control strategies and deriving the relationships between land use changes and land use impacts.