LandShift: Global Modelling to Assess Land Use Change

Abstract

This paper presents the conceptual design and sample calculations of a new global land use model “LandShift”. The model is designed to be highly modular in order to incorporate submodels that cover different parts of the global land use system and to allow new models to be added from the rapidly advancing field of land use research. It combines GIS and simulation analyses to provide both a dynamic and spatially-resolved picture of global land use changes. The basic idea is to use a modified cellular automata approach to allocate land after the suitability of land is evaluated with a suite of state-of-the art dynamic models. New features for a large-scale land use model include (i) the simulation of crop productivity with a dynamic model that provides a link between changing land use and other global change processes, (ii) the first scheme for dynamically estimating the potential of irrigated land worldwide, and (iii) a user interface for automatically translating qualitative knowledge from land use research into internal model coefficients.