Urban Research Initiative: Urban Landscape Change

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This research supported, under the Urban Research Initiative, develops an analysis of landscape change that integrates insights from economics and ecology in the urbanizing environment of the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In contrast to its primarily agricultural history, the Triangle has undergone explosive growth in the past two decades, driven in part by the industry of Research Triangle Park and three major industries.This project focuses on feedbacks between the economics of land value and ecological land conditions, particularly, on trade-offs between conservation and development. The research team hypothesizes that feedbacks are manifest in urbanizing landscapes such that decisions to devote lands to natural or open spaces, such as greenways or parks, will feed back to confer higher economic values on nearby land parcels. Thus, land use decisions will propagate a spatiotemporal pattern in land use, driving a particular trajectory of landscape change that is sensitive to small-scale planning decisions. The researchers explore this hypothesis and its implications by implementing a spatially explicitly landscape simulator developed from a nearly 20-year time series of regional land use data. This project takes advantage of an extraordinarily rich geodata infrastructure comprising ecological, economic, and remotely sensed data in a common geographic information system (GIS) and involves participants ranging from city (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) and county (Wake, Durham, and Orange) governments to local conservation organizations (e.g., The Nature Conservancy, the Triangle Land Conservancy). The researchers use the data-based model to explore actual and hypothetical land use scenarios. They also analyze the model to synthesize general implications of the feedbacks and interactions between economic and ecological land values, toward a more integrative conceptual framework and theory of landscape change in urbanizing environments. The insights gained will have broad applicability beyond this specific research site.