Prediction of Land-Use Development Under Influence of Climate Change

Land-use change is considered one of the most critical processes when attempting to understand and model the global change. Land-use change has an interdependent relationship with the climate change. Climate change in the Czech Republic incurs a substantial pressure on human society and natural ecosystems through the increase of temperature and higher occurrence of droughts and floods. The principal purpose of the study was to model and assess the future land-use distribution in the Czech Republic based on historical land-use data and climate change information. For assessment of future ecosystem services, the current rate of ecosystem service fulfillment is set and compared in time and space with modeled situations. TerrSet’s Land Change Modeller was used to create land-use projection models based on principles of historical trends and business as usual projection scenario. The land-use prediction was performed for the entire Czech Republic using HadGEM2-ES climate model with RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 emission scenarios. The output of the modeling was a set of raster maps which presented the future land coverage for each category and location. A spatio-temporal analysis was then performed to determine the difference in representation of each land cover category for a period 2012–2050. The results show that most severe change in the land cover appears in loss of agricultural sites mainly caused by increase in urban areas and forests. Planners and policymakers can use the results of this study to incorporate adaptation measures including the change of land use to more natural habitats and implementation of more ecological management to mitigate the adverse effect of urbanization and climate change. The contribution of the study is in presenting selected tools for modeling expected future land use and development of maps displaying future spatial distribution and quantification of land use categories for the Czech Republic.