The Land Use Transition Modeling (LUTM) project 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 socioeconomic factors are taken into account. Process-oriented research from social sciences will be combined with pattern-oriented methodologies from geography in order to link land use patterns at different levels. 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.

In April 2005, Marco Huigen and Koen Overmars presented their preliminary findings at the international conference. Cecil Mangabat spent seven months in the Netherlands (March to September) to work on her dissertation.