Section: New Results

Land Use/Land Cover Change (LUCC) Modelling and Ecosytem Services

The ESNET project (EcoSystem services NETworks) is a collaboration lead by LECA (Laboratoire d'ECologie Alpine, UJF) that aims at characterizing the ecosystem services of the Grenoble urban region (about 2/3 of the Isere département) at the 2040 horizon under various constraints of urban policy planning, changes in agricultural and forest management, and climate change impact on ecosystems.

The cartographic effort of the project has been hosted at Inria, and has produced in 2014 three very detailed maps of land use and land cover at the 15m resolution over the whole study area, in 1998, 2003 and 2009, respectively. An extensive analysis of the patterns of landscape change has been performed from these data, with special emphasis on urban sprawl and the associated loss of arable land. This work has been submitted for publication very recently.

A second related piece of work has been produced, both from this cartographic source and more specific remote sensing data. The objective was to characterize in detail the cultural successions and patterns of the study area, in order to produce fine scale maps of associated ecosystem services. This work has just been submitted for publication at the time of writing.

Finally, the scenarios of future land use and land cover that have been elaborated for this project have all been projected at the 2040 horizon at the 15m scale with a well-known LUCC modelling environment (Dinamica) for urban changes, and from in-project models for the other types of land use and cover. A third article bearing on these scenarios and their LUCC modelling is in preparation.

As an aside of this land use/cover modelling effort, the STEEP team has been involved in two of the most detailed ecosystem service models developed for the project: one for the analysis of crop production and associated nitrogen cycle assessment — with the final aim to constrain both the production services and water quality issue related to nitrogen loading — and one on “recreational services". Our involvement in these models was directly related to the acquired expertise in land use modelling.

In the process of this modelling exercise, the STEEP team has acquired an in-depth knowledge and expertise of LUCC models. As a consequence, various theoretical flaws have been identified in the theoretical foundations of such models. An important by-product of the ESNET project is therefore a series of articles in preparation in the team, whose aim is to address and correct these flaws in a very general way; it is hoped that LUCC theory will be put on a more serious theoretical footing as a result of this methodological work, which should be submitted for publication in 2016 for the most part. Another but more limited methodological contribution bears on the development of error models for landscape metrics, another important methodological blind-spot in the specialized literature.