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Tremendous land use change has occurred in Lagos in recent times. Modelling urban systems now extends beyond the use of geographic information systems models. This research therefore presents a loose coupling of geographic information systems and artificial neural network for simulating land use change in Lagos. The experiment is based on three land use epochs of Lagos: 1963-1978, 1978-1984, and 1984-2000. Twelve salient land use explanatory variables (distance to water, distance to residential structures, distance to industrial and commercial centres, distance to major roads, distance to railway, distance to Lagos Island, distance to international airport, distance to international seaport, distance to University of Lagos, distance to Lagos State University, income potential, and population potential) are used for the simulation. Using the Kappa statistic, the result of the simulation in terms of the order of best-fit of the reference data is: 1978-1984, 1984-2000, and 1963-1978. An evaluation of the simulation using the receiver operating characteristics corroborates the Kappa estimates. A non black-box experiment using a one-neuron neural network to assess the performance of the spatial independent variables used for the simulation indicates that for all three epochs distance to residential structures has the highest impact in the simulation while population potential has the lowest impact.

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This paper discusses the importance of variable conceptualisation and measurement in environmental research. The paper explains how wrong application of concepts can mislead the researcher when conducting research, and the resultant effects on each stage of the environmental research process. The paper is motivated by the problems behind many research students pursuing their masters or doctoral degree programmes face, especially with change in dissertations or theses titles and methods to match the contents of their reports. In this paper, the authors demystify the challenges encountered by unskilful researchers and students when trying to make their readers have a clear understanding of their research reports (dissertations or theses). Therefore, the paper may serve as a guide in planning and conducting environmental research by university degree students and early career researchers.