Introduction to the Special Issue on Spatial modeling to explore land use dynamics

Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) is a central theme of global environmental change research (Turner II 1994, Vitousek et al. 1997). The LUCC project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IBGP) and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) aims at stimulating and coordinating research on land use change (Lambin et al. 2000, Turner II et al. 1995). Scientists associated with the LUCC community have a background in different disciplines, ranging from anthropology to mathematical programming. However, this diverse group of scientists shares a common, geographic, interest: the future of the land. Much of the integration of knowledge on land use change takes place through (spatial) models that aim at explaining the causes, locations, consequences and trajectories of land use change. The variety in disciplinary origin of the researchers contributing to LUCC has lead to a wide range of different modeling approaches and techniques. The papers in this special issue provide an overview of a number of representative approaches for land use modeling that have evolved since the start of the LUCC project in 1995. The papers are selected contributions out of a series of nine conference sessions dedicated to land use modeling at the ‘‘Framing Land Use Dynamics’’ conference at Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 16–18 April 2003. The contributions provide an overview of the state-of-the art in land use modeling by presenting a range of different modeling techniques as well as methods for integrating the contribution of different disciplines into land use research. At the same time, the papers address some of the big issues identified as priorities in land use modeling (Lambin et al. 2003, Veldkamp and Lambin 2001): integration of knowledge over different scales and disciplines; the focus on land use changes at the rural-urban interface and the validation of land use models. The integration between the social, economic and spatial sciences at different scales is still one of the main challenges for LUCC research. For many of the disciplines participating in LUCC research the integration with the spatial sciences is troublesome and some of the researchers in the social sciences are not able to make optimal use of the wealth of information available through remote sensing and spatial analysis methods. At the same time, spatial modelers face difficulties in using the insights obtained from case studies of land use change conducted by sociologists and anthropologists. The LUCC implementation strategy (Lambin et al. 2000) made the integration of disciplinary approaches one of the main objectives of the programme: ‘‘The depth of understanding brought to bear from bottom-up, fieldbased approaches must be made spatially explicit, including efforts to integrate results with remote sensing information (‘pixeling the social’); remote sensing International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 19, No. 2, February 2005, 99–102