Modeling exurban development near Washington DC

Authors: Marcela SuarezRubio Todd R Lookingbill Lisa A Wainger

Publish Date: 2012/06/23

Volume: 27, Issue: 7, Pages: 1045-1061

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Abstract

The development of private rural lands can significantly fragment landscapes with potentially negative consequences on ecosystem services Models of landuse trends beyond the urban fringe are therefore useful for developing policy to manage these environmental effects However landuse change models have been primarily applied in urban environments and it is unclear whether they can adequately predict exurban growth This study compared the ability of two urban growth models to project exurban development in northcentral Virginia and western Maryland over a 24year period Patternbased urban growth models such as SLEUTH are widely used but largely mimic patterns that emerge from historic conditions rather than allowing landowner decisionmaking to project change In contrast spatiallyexplicit econometric models such as the complementary log–log hazard assessed in this study model landowner choices as profitmaximizing behavior subject to market and regulatory constraints We evaluated the two rasterbased models by comparing model predictions to observed exurban conversion at pixel and county scales The SLEUTH model was more successful at matching the total amount of new growth at the county scale than it was at the pixel scale suggesting its most appropriate use in exurban areas is as a blunt instrument to forewarn potential coarsescale losses of natural resources The econometric model performed significantly better than SLEUTH at both scales although it was not completely successful in fulfilling its promise of projecting changes that were sensitive to policy The lack of significance of some policy variables may have resulted from insufficient variation in drivers over our study area or time period but also suggests that drivers of land use change in exurban environments may differ from those identified for urban areasWe would like to thank S Guinn for his assistance with the travel cost layer C Jantz for providing access to SLEUTH3r and her valuable advice with SLEUTH and R Iovanna for his guidelines on creating the surface based on the complementary log–log hazard model Discussions with R Gardner A Elmore P Leimgruber and P Marra were invaluable in designing this study We also thank three reviewers for their valuable comments

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