The Synthesis and Spatial Dynamics of Socio-economic Metabolism and Land-use Change

Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) project plays the role of triggers for researchers to explore complicated systems of land-use change and develop land-use change models in decades. After various land-use change models, developed from different disciplines, have been broadly applied to simulate land-use change, the biophysical approach, which can unravel realistic material and energy flows in a land-use change system, is still absent. Although the spatial system modelling, based on the system-based approach, has the advantage of simulating the interactions between natural environment and socio-economic systems, and verifying hypotheses and theories of land-use change and socio-economic metabolism, but it has not received much attention due to its difficulties in dealing with spatial interaction and in integrating different softwares. This paper presents the procedure of using GIS in modelling spatial system to respond the methodological disadvantages of spatial system modeling. For simulating land-use change, an example is shown to demonstrate the capability of Model Builder in GIS software.