EFForTS-LGraf: A landscape generator for creating smallholder-driven land-use mosaics

PLoS One. 2019 Sep 27;14(9):e0222949. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0222949. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Spatially-explicit simulation models are commonly used to study complex ecological and socio-economic research questions. Often these models depend on detailed input data, such as initial land-cover maps to set up model simulations. Here we present the landscape generator EFFortS-LGraf that provides artificially-generated land-use maps of agricultural landscapes shaped by small-scale farms. EFForTS-LGraf is a process-based landscape generator that explicitly incorporates the human dimension of land-use change. The model generates roads and villages that consist of smallholder farming households. These smallholders use different establishment strategies to create fields in their close vicinity. Crop types are distributed to these fields based on crop fractions and specialization levels. EFForTS-LGraf model parameters such as household area or field size frequency distributions can be derived from household surveys or geospatial data. This can be an advantage over the abstract parameters of neutral landscape generators. We tested the model using oil palm and rubber farming in Indonesia as a case study and validated the artificially-generated maps against classified satellite images. Our results show that EFForTS-LGraf is able to generate realistic land-cover maps with properties that lie within the boundaries of landscapes from classified satellite images. An applied simulation experiment on landscape-level effects of increasing household area and crop specialization revealed that larger households with higher specialization levels led to spatially more homogeneous and less scattered crop type distributions and reduced edge area proportion. Thus, EFForTS-LGraf can be applied both to generate maps as inputs for simulation modelling and as a stand-alone tool for specific landscape-scale analyses in the context of ecological-economic studies of smallholder farming systems.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Arecaceae
  • Computer Simulation
  • Conservation of Natural Resources / methods*
  • Crop Production*
  • Crops, Agricultural*
  • Ecological Parameter Monitoring / methods*
  • Farms
  • Hevea
  • Humans
  • Indonesia

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 192626868 – SFB 990 in the framework of the collaborative German - Indonesian research project CRC990. Guy Pe’er was funded by iDiv as an sDiv catalyst post-doc.