Ecological modeling in urban environments: predicting changes in biodiversity in response to future urban development - Urban Remote Sensing: Monitoring, Synthesis and Modeling in the Urban Environment - page 348

FIGURE 25.3 Observed (2002) and predicted (2003, 2027) land cover classes for example study area north of Seattle,
Washington.

economic and land cover models predicting future changes in
land use and land cover can be integrated with models predicting
avian biodiversity to predict how this biodiversity may change

in the future. All of these steps are required in some form to be
able to relate ecological systems (in my example avian biodiver-
sity) to land cover and land cover in the future. To map land
cover requires remote sensing and advanced image classification
techniques. To predict future land cover in urban environments
requires modeling land use, since urban development is the main
driving factor behind changes in land use and changes in land
use translate into changes in land cover. The output from these
models can be incorporated into many different natural resource
planning and conservation applications. For example, site selec-
tion studies (e.g., selecting which set of sites to protect to conserve
the most biodiversity) can use the outputs from predictive land
use and land cover models as ''threats'' or ''hazards'' to weight
the site selection process (Kiesecker et al ., 2009).
Many factors are now favorable for the use of remotely sensed
data of urban environments to support environmental modeling.

TABLE 25.2 Area (km 2 ) and percent of study area expected to
gain, remain stable, or lose bird species richness as a result of
changes in the landscape predicted to occur by 2027.

All birds Native forest birds

km 2 km 2 % %

Gain 0.5 0.1 0.0 0.0

Stable 28.7 5.6 209.4 41.2

Loss 479.0 94.3 298.8 58.8