An open and extensible framework for spatially explicit land use change modelling in R: the lulccR package (0.1.0)

Abstract

Abstract. Land use change has important consequences for biodiversity and the sustainability of ecosystem services, as well as for global environmental change. Spatially explicit land use change models improve our understanding of the processes driving change and make predictions about the quantity and location of future and past change. Here we present the lulccR package, an object-oriented framework for land use change modelling written in the R programming language. The contribution of the work is to resolve the following limitations associated with the current land use change modelling paradigm: (1) the source code for model implementations is frequently unavailable, severely compromising the reproducibility of scientific results and making it impossible for members of the community to improve or adapt models for their own purposes; (2) ensemble experiments to capture model structural uncertainty are difficult because of fundamental differences between implementations of different models; (3) different aspects of the modelling procedure must be performed in different environments because existing applications usually only perform the spatial allocation of change. The package includes a stochastic ordered allocation procedure as well as an implementation of the widely used CLUE-S algorithm. We demonstrate its functionality by simulating land use change at the Plum Island Ecosystems site, using a dataset included with the package. It is envisaged that lulccR will enable future model development and comparison within an open environment.