Land Change Prediction

Research on the prediction of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) examines how humans change the landscape. In Massachusetts, this usually means the transformation from forest to some form of built land cover. There are two places in Massachusetts of particular focus. First is the Worcester region, which is experiencing deforestation due to new development in the suburbs, while properties in the downtown area remain under-developed due to past industrial contamination. HERO fellows work closely with the GIS department of the City of Worcester to advise the Mayor and City Council concerning adoption of policies for smarter growth. Second is the watershed of the Ipswich River, which is the third most threatened river in the United States. This watershed lies just north of Boston and is experiencing rapid conversion from forest to residential land, which is having a dramatic effect on water quality. The National Science Foundation has designated this project an official Long Term Ecological Research site, enabling HERO fellows to collaborate with ecologists at the Marine Biological Laboratory to examine the environmental consequences of land development in the watershed.  See paper titled "Scenarios of land-use change and nitrogen release in the Ipswich watershed, Massachusetts, USA."  This activity links with the HERO-CM Vulnerability Analysis stream. In all of these projects, HERO fellows learn GIS by using this computer technology on a daily basis for professional-level scientific research.
 

Research Products
Pontius Jr, R.G.; D. Huffaker; and K Denman. 2005. Useful techniques of validation for spatially-explicit land-change models. Ecological Modelling. In press.
Pontius Jr. R.G.; and J. Malanson. 2005. Comparison of the structure and accuracy of two land change models. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. In press.
Pontius Jr, R.G.; and N.R. Malizia. 2004. Effect of category aggregation on map comparison. In M Egenhofer, C Freksa, and H Miller (eds): GIScience2004, Lecture notes in computer science, in press. Conference proceedings of the third international conference on geographic information science. University of Maryland.
Pontius Jr, R.G.; E. Shusas; and M. McEachern. 2004. Detecting important categorical land changes while accounting for persistence. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 101(2-3): 251-268.
Pontius Jr, R.G.; A. Agrawal; and D. Huffaker. 2003. Estimating the uncertainty of land-cover extrapolations while constructing a raster map from tabular data. Journal of Geographical Systems 5(3):253-273.

Please contact Professor Gil Pontius at rpontius@clarku.edu for more information.

Visit Professor Pontius's School of Geography Web site.