The Third Thursday Web Forum is a virtual science seminar sponsored by the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy and Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center. Each seminar highlights a project that supports resource management actions across the Southeast.
Join us for a discussion about FUTURES, the FUTure Urban Regional Environment Simulation, which was developed by the Landscape Dynamics Group led by SE CASC faculty affiliate Ross Meentemeyer. FUTURES 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 Petrasova, a geospatial research software engineer at NC State, 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 U.S. that integrate dynamic flood event modeling and human adaptive response to forecast patterns of urban growth via population redistribution and adaptation. Improving Scenarios of Future Patterns of Urbanization, Climate Adaptation and Landscape Change in the Southeast, anSE CASC project, funded the work.