Developing a Forecasting Tool to Quantify the Economic Impacts of Future Urban Change on Michigan's Land Based Industries.

Stuart Gage, Michigan State University

Bryan Pijanowski, Michigan State University (now at Purdue University)

David Skole, Michigan State University

An assessment was made of the potential economic effects to key Michigan natural resource industries that might result from changes in land use. An emphasis is being placed on how future land use patterns may affect the fragmentation of the state’s natural resources. Natural resources industries that will be examined include: tourism and recreation, agriculture, forestry and mining.

The Land Transformation Model will be used to project to the year 2020 and 2040  using the current GIS-ANN Land Transformation Modeling framework. Economists from across the state of Michigan provided data and expertise was used to assess the financial impacts of the fragmentation of natural resources on these key natural resource industries.

Figure 1. Time series of urbanization around Southeastern Michigan from 1980 to 2040 produced by the LTM (click on image to the right for higher resolution graphic).

See specific years in more detail (1980, 1995, 2020 and 2040)

 

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We also examined how the fragmentation of land uses changed over time and how well the model predicted this spatial pattern as reflected in a series of landscape pattern metrics, such as patch size, number of patches and the diversity of patch types (measured as a function of Shannon Diversity using Patch Analyst 2.1).

An example of our results are shown below in Figures 2 and 3.
Figure 2. The number of patches of each land use over time for the Muskegon River Watershed, an area that covers 20% of the lower Peninsula of Michigan. patches

And for the diversity of land uses.
Figure 3. The diversiy of land uses over time for the Muskegon River Watershed. Diversity was calculated using the Shannon Diversity Index within Patch Analyst. land

A report was submitted to the Michigan Environmental and Economic Roundtable (MEER).  You can go Public Sector Consultants, Inc (Lansing Michigan) to read the report and view the PowerPoint presentation.

This project was funded by the Kellogg and Frey Foundations.

 

 

Last updated by BCP on February 3, 2008.
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