Farm types as an interface between an agroeconomical model and CLUE-Naban land change model: Application for scenario modelling

Land use planning has to consider different development goals, for instance, economic profit, biodiversity conservation, and the protection of traditional land use techniques. To evaluate different land use change scenarios for sustainable development, land use managers in the study area in southwest of China were provided with an integrated modelling approach. We applied the CLUE-Naban land-change model and a GAMS-based village farm household model (VFHM) to model a business as usual scenario (BAU) at the regional scale. The scenario was driven by the demand for different land cover types, as given by the VFHM model. In our approach, this aggregated demand was disaggregated to grid cells of 0.09 ha size with the help of the CLUE-Naban land-change model and the farm types were defined as interface between the two models. Two farm types with characteristic land management regimes and public land type were identified using cluster analysis. The results of the BAU-scenario show that the area of rubber plantation in the lowlands more likely to increase until the year 2025. Hemp was introduced as a cash crop in the highlands of the study area. Areas with the most land use changes were where land was converted from extensively-used cropland to intensively-used rubber plantations. In this paper, an organizational heuristic with two conceptual models for linking land change with driving forces and actors is presented. Therefore, the CLUE-Naban approach can contribute to improve land use planning, because this approach creates spatially explicit land use change scenarios at the regional scale and also considers the socioeconomic driving factors that influence land management issues as considered in the VFHM model.