Land use change plays an important role in global environmental change. Issues like sustainability, biodiversity loss and earth atmosphere interactions are clearly affected by land use change.

The transition of land use is especially an area where human environment interaction plays an important role. Therefore, WOTRO (NWO) financed a project called 'Linking processes and patterns of land use change at the watershed level in the Sierra Madre region, Philippines'.

This is a combined project between CML (Leiden University) and Wageningen University and carried out in co-operation with CVPED.

The project aims at the identification of driving factors that determine land use at the watershed level. Both bio-geophysical as well as socio-economic factors are taken into account.

Process-oriented research from social sciences will be combined with pattern-oriented methodologies from geography in order to link patterns at meso level to causal relations that underlie these patterns at micro level.

Finally, the results will be combined in a spatially explicit simulation model based on CLUE (conversion of land use and its effects, see http://gissrv.iend.wau.nl/~clue).

With this model near future developments of land use change can be simulated for different scenarios.

The LUTM project will focus on three levels:

(1) Multi-agent modeling of land use change at the community level.
(2) Linking processes and patterns of land use change at the watershed level.
(3) Spatially explicit analysis and modeling of land use change in the Northern Philippines and Sierra Madre region for different scenarios of near-future macro-economic and demographic developments.

This project will study spatial patterns of land use change and explore near future land use changes under different pathways of development at the regional and national level elaborating on the CLUE modeling framework. The LUTM project will result in:

• a quantitative, statistical analysis of the relation between land use change and its socio-economic and biophysical driving factors;

• a dynamic model to identify hot-spots of land use change under different scenarios of socio-economic development, and

• insights into the spatial interconnectivity of different regions in the Northern Philippines; especially the interactions between the urban region around Manila and the rural hinterlands of Central Luzon and the Sierra Madre region, will be studied in detail.

These coarse scale simulation results, being land use pressures on the study areas at the meso- and micro-level for different scenarios, will be connected to the more detailed land use change dynamics and patterns of the studies at the meso and micro level.

The 3 PhD researchers (Koen Overmars, Cecile Mangabat and Marco Huigen) are expected to defend and publish their manuscript in 2005.