Simulating Interactions Between Land Use and Land Cover Changes for Prospective Scenarios with FORESCEM

Anticipating the socio-environmental impacts of spatial planning strategies is a prerequisite for sustainable development pathways. Land change models are increasingly employed to evaluate the impacts of spatial planning on land use and land cover, and their subsequent effects on ecosystem services and environmental resources. Nevertheless, modelling land use and land cover changes, and their interactions, at a fine scale to preserve future landscape patterns has been identified as a key challenge in the land change science community. This paper presents an innovative process-based model—the FORecasting landscapE SCEnarios Model (FORESCEM)—designed to spatially simulate fine-scale future land use and land cover changes (LUCC) based on narratives developed through participatory or expert-driven approaches. By clearly distinguishing land covers and land uses as two different but related inputs, its conception and architecture enable the assessment of interactions among LUCC within human-managed landscapes. It relies on conventional functions and properties of LUCC models, and aims at completing the existing land change models. Applied on a French case study, the validation results demonstrate the model’s capability to replicate LUCC dynamics, effectively simulating trend-based and trend-breaking LUCC trajectories under contrasting scenarios. More broadly, this paper questions and discusses the validation of land change models used for simulating future LUCC.