Predicting land-use change

Land use change modelling, especially if done in a spatially-explicit, inte grated and multi-scale manner, is an important technique for the projection of alternative pathways into the future, for conducting experiments that t est our understanding of key processes in land use changes. Land-use change models should represent part of the complexity of land use systems. They o ffer the possibility to test the sensitivity of land use patterns to change s in selected variables. They also allow testing of the stability of linked social and ecological systems, through scenario building. To assess curren t progress in this field, a workshop on spatially explicit land-use/land-co ver models was organised within the scope of the Land-Use and Land Cover Ch ange project (LUCC). The main developments presented in this special issue concern progress in: 1) Modelling of drivers of land-use change; 2) modelli ng of scale dependency of drivers of land use change; 3) modelling progress in predicting location versus quantity of land-use change; 4) the incorpor ation of biophysical feedbacks in land-use change models. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.