Land-use change in a market economy, particularly at the urban?rural fringe in North America, is shaped through land and housing markets. Although market activities are at the core of economic studies of land-use change, many market elements are neglected by coupled human?environment models. We scrutinized the effects of the level of detail of market representation… Continue reading Market Impacts on Land-Use Change: An Agent-Based Experiment
Keyword: Land-use Change
Exurbia from the bottom-up: Confronting empirical challenges to characterizing a complex system
We describe empirical results from a multi-disciplinary project that support modeling complex processes of land-use and land-cover change in exurban parts of Southeastern Michigan. Based on two different conceptual models, one describing the evolution of urban form as a consequence of residential preferences and the other describing land-cover changes in an exurban township as a… Continue reading Exurbia from the bottom-up: Confronting empirical challenges to characterizing a complex system
Modeling the relationships between land use and land cover on private lands in the Upper Midwest, USA
This paper presents an approach to modeling land-cover change as a function of land-use change. We argue that, in order to model the link between socio-economic change and changes in forest cover in a region that is experiencing residential and recreational development and agricultural abandonment, land-use and land-cover change need to be represented as separate… Continue reading Modeling the relationships between land use and land cover on private lands in the Upper Midwest, USA
Agent-based and analytical modeling to evaluate the effectiveness of greenbelts
We present several models of residential development at the rural–urban fringe to evaluate the effectiveness of a greenbelt located beside a developed area, for delaying development outside the greenbelt. First, we develop a mathematical model, under two assumptions about the distributions of service centers, that represents the trade-off between greenbelt placement and width, their effects… Continue reading Agent-based and analytical modeling to evaluate the effectiveness of greenbelts
Path dependence and the validation of agent-based spatial models of land use
In this paper, we identify two distinct notions of accuracy of land-use models and highlight a tension between them. A model can have predictive accuracy: its predicted land-use pattern can be highly correlated with the actual land-use pattern. A model can also have process accuracy: the process by which locations or land-use patterns are determined… Continue reading Path dependence and the validation of agent-based spatial models of land use