Empirical Methods for Modeling Landscape Change, Ecosystem Services, and Biodiversity

The widespread development of land has been identified as a primary driver of global ecological change (Foley et al. 2005), affecting both terrestrial (Armsworth et al. 2004) and aquatic systems (Naiman and Turner 2000). It is increasingly recognized that understanding the effects of land-use change on ecosystems requires the integration of the social and natural sciences, a primary emphasis in the scientific literature now known as land change science (Turner et al. 2007). The discipline of economics has much to offer to land change science. On privately-owned landscapes, decisions regarding the use of land – whether to develop houses, grow trees, or plant a particular crop – are made within the context of local land markets and global commodity markets as well as local and regional regulatory institutions. As such, quantitative econometric land-use models are useful in accounting for such markets in estimation, especially if the modeling goal is the analysis of policies aimed at altering market incentives. However, because landscape pattern is fundamentally important for understanding many ecological processes, land-use models must confront the challenges associated with modeling not just aggregate land-use shares, but the spatial pattern of land use. Because landscape change is fundamentally shaped by the spatial pattern of landowner decisions, modeling landscap