Modeling Land-Use in Georgia: Threats to Biodiversity and Opportunities for Conservation
Abstract
Recent surges in suburbanization, population growth, and conservation funding have
transformed the conservation landscape across the United States. Where once small
local land trusts dominated the conservation community, there are now numerous national
land trusts that are pushing expansive agendas and planning at a variety of scales.
These land trusts have turned to more detailed conservation planning and threat analyses
to identify the most valuable lands, and threatened ecological communities. In an
effort to increase awareness about threat analysis and strategic conservation planning,
I conducted an analysis within two regions of Georgia: the coastal counties and the
greater Atlanta area. It was my goal to use urban land-use modeling to predict threat
of land conversion, and combine this with conservation valuation to set priorities
for biodiversity conservation in Georgia.
My approach produced urbanization trends for two land-use change models, a multi-criteria
evaluation and a neural-network analysis model, for the 14 years proceeding 2005.
I determined patch level conservation values using multiple variables, including vertebrate
species richness and a number of conservation metrics derived from literature review.
The land-use change models resulted in realistic amounts and patterns of change for
both areas, but validation of these urbanization models using urban growth between
1991-2005 produced relatively poor accuracies for the coastal counties (kappa statistics
< 0.26), and fair accuracies around Atlanta (kappa statistics > 0.40). Even though
these two models performed similarly, the MCE was easier to manage and implement then
the LTM. Examination of the conservation values of habitat patches found higher values
for the coastal counties. Comparing conservation variables between the coast and Atlanta
regions there were significant differences in species richness (p <0.05) and patch
integrity (p < 0.05). When the urban threat analysis was combined with conservation
valuation in the Atlanta region, I found that only 33 of the 570 high conservation
value patches also faced high levels of threat.
In conclusion, the multi-criteria evaluation technique showed promise as a relatively
easy way to model urbanization across a landscape and could be useful for conservation
planners across the country. In contrast the LTM was often difficult to work with
and had a steeper learning curve, which will likely hinder any widespread use of this
model. The combination of conservation valuation with threat analysis proved to be
very powerful as it drastically reduced the number of high priority parcels and simplified
choices. Conservation practitioners should take note of these findings, for they show
that simple methods can be as powerful as more complicated techniques for conservation
prioritization and land-use modeling.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1001Citation
Smith, Lincoln (2009). Modeling Land-Use in Georgia: Threats to Biodiversity and Opportunities for Conservation.
Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1001.Collections
More Info
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Rights for Collection: Nicholas School of the Environment
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info