Urban sprawl and natural areas encroachment: linking land cover change andeconomic development in the Florida Everglades

This paper presents a model treating agricultural and urban land uses simul taneously. In particular, it takes the urban model stemming from Alonso and weds it to the seminal agricultural model developed by von Thunen. In so d oing, it extends the Muth framework, which explains the encroachment of agr icultural lands by linking two industries with two different forms of land use. The present formulation considers both the encroachment of natural are as and the loss of agricultural land, or urban sprawl. It also adds realism to the two-sector model of Muth by (1) reflecting appropriate sectoral beh aviors for residential land consumers and farmers, and by (2) explicitly ad dressing structural linkages between sectors. Using the model, the paper de monstrates sufficient conditions for switching in the regimes that govern l oss of natural areas. The empirical case of South Florida is considered thr ough an application of geographic information systems to digital map archiv es of the region based on remotely sensed data. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.