Predicting land-use change

Land use change modelling, especially if done in a spatially-explicit, integrated and multi-scale manner, is an important technique for the projection of alternative pathways into the future, for conducting experiments that test our understanding of key processes in land use changes. Land-use change models should represent part of the complexity of land use systems. They offer the possibility to test the sensitivity of land use patterns to changes in selected variables. They also allow testing of the stability of linked social and ecological systems, through scenario building. To assess current progress in this field, a workshop on spatially explicit land-use/land-cover models was organised within the scope of the Land-Use and Land Cover Change project (LUCC). The main developments presented in this special issue concern progress in: 1) Modelling of drivers of land-use change; 2) modelling of scale dependency of drivers of land use change; 3) modelling progress in predicting location versus quantity of land-use change; 4) the incorporation of biophysical feedbacks in land-use change models.