Watershed land-use planning under certainty

A model of watershed land-use planning is formulated that improves on existing models by recognizing that land-use decisions have uncertain outcomes and that land uses change over time. Implications of recognizing the distinction between land-use decisions and their uncertain outcomes are discussed. The land-use changes are modelled using a Markov process. Because of the computational difficulties in determining the return associated with the complete range of possible decision sets, a heuristic technique is required. A heuristic search procedure based on stochastic dynamic programming is described.