The land use change model LUC@CMCC was reformulated in Santini and Valentini (2011) starting from the CLUEs model (Verburg et al. 2002) to reproduce the dynamics of land use/cover change in the past and project them in the future. The model consists of: a spatial module that, starting from historical to current land use/cover maps, investigates the statistical relationships between the location of user-defined land use types and some used-defined explanatory factors; and a non-spatial module, that prescripts to the model the aggregated (national to regional level) demands of land use surface to be allocated for each future simulated time step. Under these demands the model looks, during simulation, for the best approximation of land use spatial patterns by allocating, for each time step, the land use for which a specific location has the highest suitability. This suitability is given by a combination of several forcing elements: e.g. the changing spatial arrangement of explanatory factors, policy incentives, temporal and spatial influence between land uses, the elasticity to transition. The model is implemented in GIS formats so to allow spatially explicit evaluations.

Referecnces:
Santini M., Valentini, R. (2011) Predicting Hot-Spots of Land Use Changes in Italy by Ensemble Forecasting. Reg Environ Change, 11:483–502. DOI: 10.1007/s10113-010-0157-x