Modelling forest transition: Bistability of forested and abandoned landscapes

A historical generalization about forest cover change in which rapid deforestation gives way over time to forest restoration is called “the forest transition”. Prior research on the forest transition leaves three important questions unanswered. (1) How does forest loss influence an individual landowner’s incentives to reforest? (2) How does the forest recovery rate affect the likelihood of forest transition? (3) What happens after the forest transition occurs? The purpose of this paper is to develop a minimum model of the forest transition to answer these questions (Satake and Rudel, 2007). We assume that a forest is composed of many land parcels, each of which is in one of a finite list of land-use states. The land-use state of each land parcel changes stochastically. The transition probability is determined by two processes: the forest succession and the decision of landowners. The landowner tends to choose the land-use state which has a high expected discounted utility, i.e., the sum of the current and the future utilities of the land parcel. Landowners take the likelihood of future landscape changes into account when making decisions. We focus on a three-state model in which forested, agricultural, and abandoned states ar