Human activity has altered over 50% of the terrestrial landscape, with detrimental effects on ecosystems. If the current trend continues, biodiversity loss will intensify with potentially irreversible consequences on wildlife and human well-being. Advances in satellite data, GIS, and statistical modeling can provide a unique opportunity for tracking global change and understanding underlying drivers. These data are essential to planning for a brighter future, but only if we can connect to and engage with decision makers on issues of mutual benefit. Our research integrates feedback from regional stakeholders into a spatially explicit land use model to illustrate future landscapes under five different scenarios. We developed scenarios with a group of stakeholders with diverse natural resource and socio-economic backgrounds. These scenarios represent futures spanning wide demographic differences and planning efforts that range from strategic to opportunistic. Starting with environmental and socio-economic data, we incorporated local knowledge of future development densities and a logistic growth sub-model using population projections provided by academics and state governments. We used the modeling platform DinamicaEGO to create maps representing 50-year projections in land use change for each scenario.
Results/Conclusions
Projected land use futures demonstrated how each scenario affected the total area and overall connectivity of forest patches in our study area of Northwestern VA. The spatial configuration of forests and their role as protected areas buffers is relevant to wildlife conservation, recreation, and freshwater provisioning and quality. Overall, forest cover decreased in every scenario, however patch size, core area, and spatial configuration differed depending on whether development concentrated near urban areas or sprawled across the landscape. Scenarios with higher populations resulted in higher total number of forested patches (up to 3000 more patches), but less total area (upwards of 200 sqkm). In addition, we measured less core area for high population scenarios and less connectivity of forest across the landscape. We identified an interactive effect of population and planning scenarios on total area with less total area also identified for scenarios with opportunistic planning strategies. In addition, we found forest patches to be more connected in scenarios with strategic planning, with the greatest difference in overall forest connectivity between scenarios of low population growth but differing planning approaches. Furthermore, all scenarios resulted in a loss of forested buffers around large, existing protected lands. Our work illustrates how balancing stakeholder involvement with quantitative modeling can result in economically and ecologically relevant measures of land use change.