Modelling regional land change scenarios to assess land abandonment and reforestation dynamics in the Pyrenees (France)

Co-constructing future land-use scenarios for the Grenoble region, France

“…Projected scenario impacts were consistent with modelling studies for European mountain regions, showing polarisation of landscapes through urbanisation at the expense of agricultural land and forest colonisation of less productive areas (Schirpke et al, 2012;Houet et al 2015 ;Vacquie et al, 2015;Stürck et al 2016). However, the scenarios produced contrasting spatial patterns.…”

“…Here, guidance from stakeholders was critical for identifying relevant documents and information, along with their specific inputs for missing parameters. Mountain regions require intensive efforts for incorporating their biophysical constraints and associated social contexts into detailed scenarios (Lamarque et al 2013;Vacquie et al 2015;Walz et al 2007).…”

“…Each of these models and their scales of implementation were selected according to our analysis of recent dynamics (1998-2009Vannier et al, 2016) and to data availability (Magliocca et al, 2015). LULC scenario modelling studies in mountains have instead used integrated spatial modelling platforms (FOREcasting SCEnarios - Sohl and Sayler, 2008 ;Land Change Modeler -Eastman, 2012 in the Pyrenees - Vacquie et al (2015) and Houet et al (2015); SPA-LUCC in the Austrian Alps - Schirpke et al 2012), which are more generic and replicable. First rather than combining deterministic (agricultural and forest areas) and probabilistic (urban areas) methods as done here, they rely on common probabilistic models (Magliocca et al, 2015;Sohl and Sayler, 2008;Verburg et al, 2002), which they typically apply to simpler LULC typologies (7 classes on average) across smaller areas (from 7-35 km² - Schirpke et al, 2012, to 498 km² -Houet et al 2015.…”

Evaluating the spatial uncertainty of future land abandonment in a mountain valley (Vicdessos, Pyrenees - France): Insights from model parameterization and experiments

“…This study compares only two scenarios, but further work based on this approach (for e.g. Vacquié et al 2015), and combining more scenarios would lead to a more complex but nevertheless concise outcome. The present study made it possible to distinguish the inherent uncertainty of a scenario resulting from model sensitivity to parameters, and the ensemble uncertainty resulting from the different scenarios ( Figure 10).…”

Current practices and challenges for modelling past and future land use and land cover changes in mountainous regions

“…For a given area and scenario, LULCC models are used to identify where land use change is likely to happen in the future, and what direction the change may have (Vacquie et al 2015). A scenario represents here an assumption about a future trajectory of various interwoven factors that hypothetically influence and shape LULCC for a given area, and may therefore pick up any subset out of the socioeconomic, political, cultural and biophysical factors that seem relevant.…”