The overarching goal of this dissertation was to improve our understanding of the coupled natural-human land-use system in Southeastern Michigan. To accomplish this task Chapter Two presents an implementation of the Dynamic Exurban Ecological Development (DEED) model, which was used to evaluate the effects of land-use policies on forest cover. This research demonstrates one way to improve our understanding of how policy and land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) interact and can influence aggregate forest cover. The chapter provides novel contributions in the form of a framework for evaluating land-use policy effects on development and land cover, an approach to integrate an agent-based model with a geographic information system (GIS), and new examples of methods to empirically inform agent-based models.
To extend coupled natural-human systems research to include the ecological effects of LUCC and policy scenarios, Chapter Three presents an analysis of the effects of forest patch size and shape, and landscape pattern, on carbon storage estimated by BIOME-BGC. New insights from this research showed
- the inclusion of within-forest-patch air-temperature heterogeneity can significantly influence carbon storage estimates,
- that carbon storage estimates increase logarithmically with increasing forest fragmentation when only within-patch heterogeneity of air temperature is considered, and
- the utility of integrating GIS and BIOME-BGC for site data collection and visualization of results.
To better evaluate the effects of land-use development policies on land-cover change and ecosystem function, effectively combining the products of Chapters Two and Three, an analysis of land cover at the residential parcel level was necessary. Land-cover analyses at the parcel level have rarely been done. Chapter Four takes a step to remedy this problem by presenting new data that describe the quantity, fragmentation, and autocorrelation of land-cover within residential land-use parcels. Results from Chapter Four could extend the policy analysis in Chapter Two, conducted at the subdivision level, to the individual parcel such that we could evaluate policies that affect individual residents and their behavior. By capturing the distribution and patterns of land-cover types across different parcel sizes we can begin to understand the linkages between household land-cover behaviors, neighborhood interactions, and landscape patterns.
