DLESE description of Spatial Land Use Change and Ecological Effects at the Rural-Urban Interface: Project SLUCE

Project SLUCE seeks to understand the individual decision-making that drives land use decisions and to formulate and test alternative policies and interventions that could reduce environmental costs and enhance environmental benefits. The project is focusing a multidisciplinary team on developing, evaluating, and applying agent based models of land use and cover change processes and assessing the interactions with ecosystem structure and function. Models and tools resulting from this proposed work will have direct implications for understanding both social and landscape dynamics within an urban system as well as projecting patterns of ecological change at the urban-rural fringe. This website allows the user to search for investigators, research projects, and even download data and software to allow indivdual applications of SLUCE modeling. This resource is part of the Biocomplexity collection. http://serc.carleton.edu/biocomplexity/