Prototyping a Methodology for Long-Term (1680–2100) Historical-to-Future Landscape Modeling for the Conterminous United States

Abstract

Land system change has been identified as one of four major Earth system processes where change has passed a destabilizing threshold. A historical record of landscape change is required to understand the impacts change has had on human and natural systems, while scenarios of future landscape change are required to facilitate planning and mitigation efforts. A methodology for modeling long-term historical and future landscape change was applied in the Delaware River Basin of the United States. A parcel-based modeling framework was used to reconstruct historical landscapes back to 1680, parameterized with a variety of spatial and nonspatial historical datasets. Similarly, scenarios of future landscape change were modeled for multiple scenarios out to 2100. Results demonstrate the ability to represent historical land cover proportions and general patterns at broad spatial scales and model multiple potential future landscape trajectories. The resulting land cover collection provides consistent data from 1680 through 2100, at a 30-m spatial resolution, 10-year intervals, and high thematic resolution. The data are consistent with the spatial and thematic characteristics of widely used national-scale land cover datasets, facilitating use within existing land management and research workflows. The methodology demonstrated in the Delaware River Basin is extensible and scalable, with potential applications at national scales for the United States.

Gridded land use data for the conterminous United States 1940–2015

“…The historical land use data products are published as part of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US) 23 , 24 and will be accessible through Harvard Dataverse ( https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/hisdacus ). HISDAC-US has been used in several recent studies on urban development and change 25 – 30 , landscape change analysis and modelling 31 , transportation infrastructure analysis 32 , population modelling 33 , as well as natural hazard risk assessment 34 , 35 .…”

Historical and contemporary drivers of knickpoint retreat and morphological evolution along Bayou Pierre, Mississippi

“…We similarly extracted the total density of grazing animals over the same period as a proxy of potential pasture land use. Land use data and estimates were extracted from the USGS Forecasting Scenarios of Land‐Use Change FORE‐SCE backcast models from 1938 to 1992 and forecast models from 1992 to 2021 (Dornbierer et al, 2021; Sohl et al, 2014), as well as the more recent National Land Cover Database (MRLC 2022) 2001–2019 datasets. We used rainfall data for the five counties drained by Bayou Pierre (Claiborne, Copiah, Hinds, Jefferson, and Lincoln) from 1938 to 2022 (NOAA 2023) to describe hydrologic variability in the watershed.…”

“…We similarly extracted the total density of grazing animals over the same period as a proxy of potential pasture land use. Land use data and estimates were extracted from the USGS Forecasting Scenarios of Land-Use Change FORE-SCE backcast models from 1938 to 1992 and forecast models from 1992 to 2021 (Dornbierer et al, 2021;Sohl et al, 2014) S1). In addition, we utilized 1958 photo mosaics for a limited set of analyses in HWBP.…”

HISDAC-ES: Historical Settlement Data Compilation for Spain (1900–2020)

“…HISDAC-US consists of gridded datasets that measure built-up intensity and settlement age , building density , and building function (McShane et al, 2022), at 250m spatial resolution from 1810 to 2015, and from 1940 to 2015, respectively. These datasets have widely been used by researchers for various scientific studies (e.g., Millhouser 2019;Balch et al, 2020;Mietkiewicz et al, 2020;McDonald et al, 2021;Ferrara et al, 2021;Boeing 2021;Li et al, 2021;Dornbierer et al, 2021;Millard-Ball 2022;Salazar-Miranda 2022;Wan et al, 2022).…”