SE CASC and SECAS Science Seminar – Scaling up Urban Growth Projections with FUTURES

Seminar Title: Scaling up Urban Growth Projections with FUTURES

Speaker: Dr. Anna Petrasova (NCSU)

Learn more and register here.

Overview

FUTURES is the FUTure Urban-Regional Environment Simulation and was developed by the Landscape Dynamics Group led by SE CASC Faculty Affiliate, Ross Meentemeyer. It is an open source urban growth model developed to address the environmental and ecological impacts of urbanization by explicitly capturing the spatial structure of development. After successfully applying FUTURES to several regional-scale studies, the analysis has been scaled up, simulating future urbanization at 30m resolution across the Contiguous United States leveraging the NLCD time series. In this talk, Anna will introduce the model, talk about the challenges associated with scaling it up, present the results, and discuss how to keep the developed data product up-to-date. She will also present the effort to model climate-aware scenarios for the Southeast US that integrate dynamic flood event modeling and human adaptive response to forecast patterns of urban growth via population redistribution and adaptation. The work was funded by SE CASC project, Improving Scenarios of Future Patterns of Urbanization, Climate Adaptation, and Landscape Change in the Southeast.