Land use change in California, 2001-2100

The SLEUTH urbanization and land use change model was used to produce century-long forecasts of California’s land uses to the year 2100. We describe how data were assembled and conflated for the model, how the model was applied to the very large and high resolution dataset, and how calibration of the model was performed using a genetic algorithm. The calibration results showed that the model accuracy was high, and suitable for simulations, which used Monte Carlo methods to capture both future land uses and their modeling uncertainty. The simulations showed the amount and location of anticipated futures changes in land use, dominated by changes to urban and a few other pairs of land use transitions. The proportion of urban land was 6.7% in 2001, 8.8% in 2011, and is forecast to reach 14.5% in 2050 and 17.6% in 2100, converting some 4,456,160 hectares of land. Farmland lost 224,135 Ha. between 2001 and 2011, but is projected to lose another 1,346,912 Ha by 2100, a decline over the century...