Turner, M. G., S. R. Carpenter, E. J. Gustafson, R. J. Naiman, and S. M. Pearson. 1998. Land use. Pages 37-61 In: M. J. Mac, P. A. Opler, P. Doran, and C. Haecker, editors. Status and trends of our nation's biological resources. Volume1. National Biological Service, Washington, D.C.
 

Wear, David N.; Bolstad, Paul. 1998. Land-use changes in Southern Appalachian landscapes: spatial analysis and forecast evaluation. Ecosystems. 1: 575-594

Abstract: Understanding human disturbance regimes is crucial for developing effective conservation and ecosystem management plans and for targeting ecological research to areas that define scarce ecosystem services. We evaluate and develop a forecasting model for land-use change in the Southern Appalachians. We extend previous efforts by (a) addressing the spatial diffusion of human populations, approximated by building density, (b) examining a long time period (40 years, which is epochal in economic terms), and (c) explicitly testing the forecasting power of the models. The resulting model, defined by linking a negative binomial regression model of building density with a logit model of land cover, was fit using spatially referenced data from four study sites in the Southern Appalachians. All fitted equations were significant, and coefficient estimates indicated that topographic features as well as location significantly shape population diffusion and land use across these landscapes. This is especially evident in the study sites that have experienced development pressure over the last 40 years. Model estimates also indicate significant spatial autocorrelation in land-use observations. Forecast performance of the models was evaluated by using a separate validation data set for each study area. Depending on the land-use classification scheme, the models correctly predicted between 68% and 89% of observed land uses. Tests based on information theory reject the hypothesis that the models have no explanatory power, and measures of entropy and information gain indicate that the estimated models explain between 47% and 66% of uncertainty regarding land-use classification. Overall, these results indicate that modeling land-cover change alone may not be useful over the long run, because changing land cover reflects the outcomes of more than one human process. Here, additional information was gained by addressing the spatial spread of human populations. Furthermore, coarse-scale measures of the human drivers of landscape change appear to be poor predictors of changes realized at finer scales. Simulations demonstrate how this type of approach might be used to target scarce resources for conservation and research efforts into ecosystem effects.
 

Wear, D.N. and R.O. Flamm. 1993. Public and private forest disturbance regimes in the southern Appalachians. Natural Resource Modeling 7(4): 379-397.
 

Wear, D.N., M.G. Turner, and R.O. Flamm. 1996. Ecosystem management with multiple owners: Landscape dynamics in a southern Appalachian watershed. Ecological Applications 6(4):1173-1188.

Abstract: Ecosystem management is emerging as an organizing theme for land use and resource management in the United States. However, while this subject is dominating professional and policy discourse, little research has examined how such system-level goals might be formulated and implemented. Effective ecosystem management will require insights into the functioning of ecosystems at appropriate scales and their responses to human interventions, as well as factors such as resource markets and social preferences that hold important influence over land and resource use. In effect, such management requires an understanding of ecosystem processes that include human actors and social choices. We examine ecosystem management issues using spatial models that simulate landscape change for a study site in the southern Appalachian highlands of the United States. We attempt to frame a set of ecosystem management issues by examining how this landscape could develop under a number of different scenarios designed to reflect historical land-cover dynamics as well as hypothetical regulatory approaches to ecosystem management. Scenarios based on historical change show that recent shifts in social forces that drive land cover change on both public and private lands imply a more stable and a more forested landscape. Scenarios based on two hypothetical regulatory instruments indicate that public land management may have only limited influence on overall landscape pattern and that spatially targeted approaches on public and private lands may be more efficient than blanket regulation for achieving landscape-level goals.