Approach to Improve Handling of Complexity in Land-use and Land-cover Change Modelling

Abstract: Improved understanding of land-use/land-cover change will be essential to help identify and follow more sustainable development pathways in a resource constrained world. While land-use/land-cover change models have advanced to address different domains, questions, processes, themes, scales and levels of complexity, they continue to have several inherent limitations. The limitations stem mainly from conceptualisation of landscapes as “scanned paper maps ” that represent land use/cover as simple, non-overlapping categorical objects and include: 1) confounding of cover and use, 2) inability to depict more than one cover/use, 3) simplification of highly complex systems, 4) one process for many different types of change, and 5) substantial data pre-processing that hampers model development. To help overcome those limitations, we present a conceptual modelling approach that characterises landscape as “land systems ” consisting of interacting components. Each component is depicted and operates at its own appropriate scale, subject to considerations of interest, data availability, or usually both. An important aspect is the atomisation of data into fundamental component