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Past Research 1996-2002 P-IC. Socio-economic Drivers of Land-use Change Summary: Our current work focuses on explaining patterns of land use in the southern Appalachians using classical land use models, i.e. von Thunen-type land allocation models which will be extended to explicitly address spatial factors. This work addresses the modern era of land-use dating to the 1940s and compares land use patterns across time periods. Historic and current land and resource uses are among the most direct and the most important forces affecting the composition and productivity of southern Appalachian ecosystems. Land uses are determined by both broad scale factors such as market prices for timber and agricultural products and local factors such as the topography, soil type, and location of a site. All of these factors are the basic inputs to landowners' decision making, through which they interact to define land use and vegetative patterns that vary over both space and time. Understanding how these human decisions
define landscape structure is essential for:
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