Projecting future land use/land cover by integrating drivers and plan prescriptions: the case for watershed applications

Abstract

Watershed planning is a pivotal exercise for all jurisdictions irrespective of size, landscape complexity, or other nuances. As a result of the intricate relationship between land use/land cover (LULC) and water resources, it becomes prudent to not only develop historical and contemporary LULC data for watershed planning purposes, but more importantly, the production of future LULC datasets has the potential to better inform watershed planners. This study explored an optimal workflow that can be adopted for the production of baseline LULC input images from a moderate spatial resolution sensor such as Landsat, and the identification, translation, and configuration of land change drivers and regional comprehensive plan prescriptions in the creation of future LULC data for a regional watershed. The study conducted in the Lower Chippewa River Watershed, Wisconsin, USA demonstrated that an object-based hybrid classification approach resulted in the generation of improved projected images with a 15% increase in area under the curve (AUC) value compared to a pixel-based hybrid classification method even though both methods displayed comparable overall image classification accuracies (≤ 1.8%). Results further displayed that configuring anthropogenic drivers in a trend format rather than individual year values can result in a more efficient training of a multi-layer perceptron neural network – Markov Chain model. The calibrated and validated model demonstrated that on average, residential, commercial, institutional, green vegetation/shrub, and industrial LULC are expected to grow through 2050, though at a slower rate (12%) compared to contemporary period (39%), while forest and agricultural lands are slated to decline (−2%).

Keywords:

• future land use/land cover
• anthropogenic drivers
• watershed planning
• Chippewa River
• Wisconsin

Acknowledgments

This research is sponsored by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and the Department of Geography and Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The authors wishes to thank senior planners of the West Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission for their invaluable inputs throughout this project. Finally, the authors would like to express gratitude to three anonymous individuals for providing pivotal suggestions that helped improve the manuscript and also all those who gave positive feedback on the research during several conference presentations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and the Department of Geography and Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.