Land use in the southern Yucatán peninsular region of Mexico: Scenarios of population and institutional change

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.01.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Land-use and land-cover change, human activity that results in altered land-use systems and surface features, defines the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of communities around the globe. It is a key response to global environmental change in addition to being both a key cause and medium of this change. This article examines an application of the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region Integrated Assessment (SYPRIA), a scenario-based spatially explicit model designed to examine and project land use in Mexico. SYPRIA combines Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with agent-based modeling, cellular modeling, and genetic programming. The application examined here explores the effects on land-use and land-cover projections of scenarios that rely on varying assumptions pertaining to population growth, land-use trends, role of agrarian technology, and effects of resource institutions. This work also highlights the importance of understanding the many factors influencing land use, particularly population, different production systems, and the contextual nature of resource institutions in determining the nature of land use.

Section snippets

Modeling land-use and land-cover change

A unifying theme in understanding many dimensions of global environmental change is land-use and land-cover change (LUCC), human activity that results in altered land-use systems and surface features. This change contributes roughly a quarter of anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and has ancillary effects such as biotic diversity impacts and desertification (Steffen et al., 2003). LUCC is also essential to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of

SYPRIA: actors, environment, and institutions

SYPRIA serves several roles as part of a larger LUCC research enterprise, Land-Cover and Land-Use Change in the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region (SYPR or “the SYPR project”) (Turner, Geoghegan, & Foster, 2004). The current version of SYPRIA was designed to accomplish three goals: (1) to demonstrate how complexity-based methods can be joined to examine the effects of different kinds of computational decision-making analogs (Manson, 2004b); (2) to test how land manager decision-making

Scenario results

SYPRIA is based on scenarios designed to elicit the influence of varying configurations of land managers, ecological conditions, and institutional characteristics. Four pairs of scenarios are outlined in Table 2. Two pairs of scenarios pertain to the quantity of land change projected to occur as driven by population (P1 and P2) and land-use (L1 and L2). The two remaining scenario pairs consider how the location of LUCC is influenced by market-oriented agriculture (A1 and A2) and ejidal

Discussion and conclusion

SYPRIA draws on the driving-forces conceptualization of global change in order to elucidate the relationships between environment, institutions, and land use. It combines genetic programming, cellular models, and agent-based models in a GIS framework to explore the relationships between human decision making and ecological and social systems. SYPRIA also highlights the importance of modeling, and model validation, in examining the many factors in influencing land use, particularly in terms of

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth System Science Fellowship program (ESS 99-0000-0008) and a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant (NSF 99-07952). It is also supported by NASA’s Land-Cover and Land-Use Change program through the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region project (NAG 56406 and NAG 511134) and the Center for Integrated Studies of Global Environmental Change, Carnegie Mellon University (NSF-SBR

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