Experimental Simulations of Land-Use Land Cover Change (LULCC) Under Heterogeneous Policy Regimes: An Agent Based Model of Rural-Urban-Forest Interface in the Missisquoi Watershed of Lake Champlain Basin, 2000-2050

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) of LULCC provide a bottom-up approach to simulate emergent landscapes that arise out of complex social-ecological interactions. While many ABMs have been developed that simulate LULCC within agriculture, urban or forest sectors, very few ABMs simulate LULCC across agriculture, forest and urban landscapes. In this paper, we present experimental simulations from a novel ABM that is programmed to simulate Rural-Urban-Forest Interface through explicitly modeling interactions among multiple agents (farmers, urban residences, urban businesses) and between bounded-rational agents and eco-system services generated by agricultural, forested and urban landscapes. The ABM simulates 30mx30m LULCC in fifteen land-use classifications consistent with National Land Cover Database (NLCD) and other remote sensing databases. We present experimental simulations that simultaneously test the affect of retaining and alternating current land-use policies, such as forest conservation policies, agricultural subsidies and urbanization growth rates at watershed scales. The proposed ABM is applied to simulate rural-urban-forest interface in the Missisquoi watershed of Lake Champlain Basin, initialized with remotely sensed NLCD and parcel data in 2000-2, evolving at annual time-step to 2050. NLCD 2012 data is used to calibrate the baseline simulation run. Monte Carlo simulation runs are undertaken to test the affects of modifying Vermont’s landmark Act 250 that protects forest conservation in lieu of urbanization and agricultural growth. The proposed ABM can be used by watershed managers, policy makers and scientists to examine the affects of alternate policy regimes on LULCC in Missisquoi. The proposed ABM is generalizable and can be replicated in other watershed settings where remote sensing, parcel and census databases are available. In addition, the proposed ABM can be coupled with hydro-meteorological and hydro-dynamic models to simulate the effects of nutrient run-offs on water quality under alternate policy and land use planning regimes.