Agent-based land change modeling: Considering the impact of landscape visibility

Keywords: Agent-based Model, Land change Modeling, Visibility Analysis, Cyberinfrastructure
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Agent-based models have been extensively applied to the study of land use and land cover change. Individuals and their decision making processes can be explicitly represented as agents and their rules. Agent-based land change decision making processes are often driven by biophysical and socio-economic factors. However, landscape visibility has been a factor that has not received much attention in agent-based land change modeling partially because of the related big data-driven computational challenge. In this study, we present an agent-based land change model that supports the consideration of landscape visibility. We propose a cyberinfrastructure-enabled high-performance computing approach to resolve the computational challenge related to landscape visibility analysis. Thus, landscape visibility can be incorporated into agent-based decision-making processes that drive land conversion. We conduct experiments to evaluate the utility of agent-based land change model with landscape visibility explicitly considered.