Urban Research Initiative: Urban Landscape Change

这项研究在城市研究倡议的支持下，对北卡罗来纳州研究三角地区城市化环境中的景观变化进行了分析，整合了经济学和生态学的见解。与其主要的农业历史不同，三角地区在过去20年里经历了爆炸性的增长，部分原因是研究三角园区的产业和三大产业的推动。该项目侧重于土地价值经济学和生态土地条件之间的反馈，特别是在保护和发展之间的权衡。研究小组假设，反馈在城市化景观中很明显，因此将土地用于自然或开放空间(如绿道或公园)的决定将反馈给附近的地块赋予更高的经济价值。因此，土地利用决策将在土地利用中传播时空格局，驱动对小规模规划决策敏感的特定景观变化轨迹。研究人员通过实现一个空间上明确的景观模拟器来探索这一假设及其意义，该模拟器是根据近20年的区域土地利用数据时间序列开发的。该项目利用了非常丰富的地理数据基础设施，包括公共地理信息系统(GIS)中的生态、经济和遥感数据，参与者包括从城市(罗利、达勒姆和教堂山)和县(韦克、达勒姆和奥兰治)政府到当地保护组织(例如自然保护协会、三角土地保护协会)。研究人员使用基于数据的模型来探索实际和假设的土地使用情景。他们还分析了该模型，以综合经济和生态土地价值之间的反馈和相互作用的一般含义，朝着更完整的概念框架和城市化环境中景观变化的理论。所获得的见解将在这个特定的研究站点之外具有广泛的适用性。

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.