Land-cover and land-use changes are an important part of global change but determine as well livelihoods at local and regional level. The knowledge of change trajectories and possible future conditions is important for a sustainable development strategy. Further on, reliable scenarios with spatial explicit simulations are needed as planning tools for decision makers. This paper describes an example application to gain this knowledge for an area in the semi humid tropics which was performed within the framework of the IMPETUS project.
The study investigates the current trends in land-cover change in a West African catchment in central Benin. During the last decade a high rate of expansion of agricultural area is observed. Through logistic regression the determinants of the spatial pattern of land- cover and land-use is analyzed. Some distance factors and population density as predictors have a high prediction strength measured with the ROC method. Based on these regression results future land-use changes are simulated with the CLUE-S framework, a statistic-dynamic approach developed at the University of Wageningen. The simulation results can serve as planning tools to compare different policy measures.