Calibrating and Validating a Simulation Model to Identify Drivers of Urban Land Cover Change in the Baltimore, MD Metropolitan Region

Claire Jantz, Scott Drzyzga and Michael Maret
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Claire Jantz: Department of Geography-Earth Science, Shippensburg University, 1871 Old Main Dr., Shippensburg, PA 17257, USA
Scott Drzyzga: Department of Geography-Earth Science, Shippensburg University, 1871 Old Main Dr., Shippensburg, PA 17257, USA
Michael Maret: City Planner, Urban Development Department, City of Hattiesburg, 200 Forrest St., Hattiesburg, MS 39401, USA

Land, 2014, vol. 3, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: We build upon much of the accumulated knowledge of the widely used SLEUTH urban land change model and offer advances. First, we use SLEUTH’s exclusion/attraction layer to identify and test different urban land cover change drivers; second, we leverage SLEUTH’s self-modification capability to incorporate a demographic model; and third, we develop a validation procedure to quantify the influence of land cover change drivers and assess uncertainty. We found that, contrary to our a priori expectations, new development is not attracted to areas serviced by existing or planned water and sewer infrastructure. However, information about where population and employment growth is likely to occur did improve model performance. These findings point to the dominant role of centrifugal forces in post-industrial cities like Baltimore, MD. We successfully developed a demographic model that allowed us to constrain the SLEUTH model forecasts and address uncertainty related to the dynamic relationship between changes in population and employment and urban land use. Finally, we emphasize the importance of model validation. In this work the validation procedure played a key role in rigorously assessing the impacts of different exclusion/attraction layers and in assessing uncertainty related to population and employment forecasts.

Keywords: Baltimore; Maryland; SLEUTH; land use change; cellular automata (CA); validation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:3:y:2014:i:3:p:1158-1179:d:40330

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