Existing models of agricultural decisionmaking based on economic optimization often fall short of capturing the complex dynamics of land-use choices at both individual parcel and watershed-level scales. The complexity arises from an interplay of several factors, as explained by Herbert Simon’s...

This paper presents the concept of a spatial landscape grammar. The concept formally draws parallels between the structures of linguistics and the character of real-world landscapes. Landscape grammar can be used to define a landscape’s character by using a vocabulary of landscape object types...

Scenario-based investigations of possible futures have been used since the middle of the 20th century to help decisionmakers cope with alternative courses of action and elements of uncertainty. Since the early 1970s, they have been increasingly used for landscape planning. Each scenario-based...

Research has shown that views are an important factor in the overall satisfaction of building occupants, but, because they are qualitative and subjective, views are difficult to assess. This paper presents a new approach to analyzing views using a fuzzy logic methodology, with the aim of...

The authors discuss recent progress in extracting road networks from digital imagery. We briefly review recent developments in methods for the automatic extraction of road centre line networks and propose a related algorithm aimed at encoding the geometry of road networks with line segments. Our...

This paper gives a technique to extrapolate the anticipated accuracy of a prediction of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) to any point in the future. The method calibrates a LUCC model with information from the past in order to simulate a map of the present, so that it can compute an...

<?tlsb=-.01w>Recent urban development along the US coasts has negatively impacted the local environment, <?tlsb><?tws><?tlss>and these impacts will only increase thanks to rapid regional population growth. Empirical spatially disaggregate land-use models provide a way to explore future conditions and environmental impacts...</?tlss></?tws></?tlsb></?tlsb=-.01w>

In 2003 the European Commission introduced the EC Directive on the energy performance of buildings in recognition of the importance of energy savings in the urban housing stock. The Directive gives the member states freedom to design the different elements in practice. The energy certificate for...

Differences in stakeholders' perceptions, lack of commitment, unused knowledge, and interfering, ineffective, measures are just some of the problems encountered in sustainable urban development projects. Collaborative decisionmaking approaches tackle these problems by creating a shared...