Urban Research Initiative: Urban Landscape Change

这项研究的支持下，城市研究计划，开发景观变化的分析，整合了经济学和生态学的见解，在研究三角，北卡罗来纳州的城市化环境。 与其以农业为主的历史相反，三角区在过去二十年中经历了爆炸性的增长，部分原因是三角研究园区和三大产业的推动。本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是明显的，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以赋予更高的经济价值。 因此，土地利用决策将传播土地利用的时空模式，驱动一个特定的轨迹景观变化，是敏感的小规模规划决策。 研究人员通过实施一个从近20年的区域土地利用数据时间序列开发的空间明确的景观模拟器来探索这一假设及其影响。 该项目利用了一个非常丰富的地理数据基础设施，包括共同地理信息系统（GIS）中的生态、经济和遥感数据，参与者包括市（罗利、达勒姆和查佩尔山）、县（威克、达勒姆和橙子）政府和当地保护组织（例如， 大自然保护协会（Nature Conservancy），三角土地保护协会（Triangle Land Conservancy）。 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影响，走向一个更综合的概念框架和城市化环境中的景观变化理论。 所获得的见解将具有广泛的适用性超出这个特定的研究网站。

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.