Land Use Simulation for Europe

Land use change is driven by a variety of forces, including spatial policies formulated at supra-national, national, regional and local levels. The main focus of this book is to contextualize, explain and illustrate a new methodology for simulating land use change in different parts of Europe. It considers some of the more important causal factors and identifies state-of-the-art approaches to modelling human and environmental systems, and for evaluating and visualizing alternative scenarios. The last part of the volume presents material from two case studies, one from The Netherlands and one from Portugal, of the implementation of a new simulation model called EuroScanner. The work should be of interest to researchers and practioners whose work involves geography, simulation and modelling, environmental planning, spatial decision making, the methodology of social sciences and economics. This volume contains a CD-rom with full-colour versions of many of the figures.