Geomatic Approaches for Modeling Land Change Scenarios. An Introduction

Land change models can help scientists and users to understand change processes and design policies to reduce the negative impact of human activities on the earth system at scales ranging from global to local. With the development of increasingly large computing capacities, multiple computer-based models have been created, with the result that the specific domain covered by the umbrella term “modeling” has become rather vague. Even within the context of the spatiotemporal modeling of land use and cover changes (LUCC), the term “modeling” can have many different meanings. There is also an increasing interest in the literature in comparing the different land change models. One of the aims of this book is to contribute to these processes. We focus on geomatic modeling approaches applied in this context to land change, a term that has been used synonymously for a number of years with LUCC and seems to be overtaking it as the generally used term for this phenomenon. The objective of this book is also clear to see from the methods we have chosen and the subjects we address. This book deals first and foremost with spatially explicit data that can be mapped. However, its additional focus on land change and land change scenarios in the wider field of environmental and social dynamics give it a certain consistency with a view to practical applications.