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Abstract
When farmland is abandoned pasture is rapidly taken over by woody vegetation. As tree dispersal depends on the presence of a seed source nearby and other local conditions, and can be measured in discrete annual time steps, a Cellular Automata model (CA) is a natural fit for modelling this phenomenon. The model presented here is a stochastic CA, with a relaxed definition of neighbourhood. The aim is to explore sources of uncertainty in the model, and techniques for handling and visualising uncertainty. The results show that it is possible to realistically model vegetation change using CA, acknowledging and incorporating uncertainty.
Acknowledgements
This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented by the authors at SIRC NZ 2013, GIS and Remote Sensing Research Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 29–30 August 2013.