Hi @Ciaran -
There are many different ways of creating future land cover maps/scenarios. How to create them depends on what is informing the scenarios, and what kind of information you have about how things change. Are you considering some sort of policy? Using stakeholder input? Do you have actual spatial data on how things might change? If not, what is your criteria for change?
If you have maps of, say, places where an area is to be restored, or converted to another land use type, you can use those spatial areas to edit the original land cover map. If you’re modeling something like urban expansion by X%, you can create a buffer around the urban areas in your current land cover map, and convert the buffered area to urban in the future map. Or perhaps you’re doing a what-if scenario, where all agricultural lands incorporate agroforestry. Then you can do something as simple as changing the carbon pool table values for agriculture, to reflect the increase in carbon from the additional trees.
We also provide a Scenario Generator tool that might be useful - here’s the User Guide description:
“The proximity-based scenario generator creates a set of contrasting land use change maps that convert habitat in different spatial patterns. The user determines which habitat can be converted and what they are converted to, as well as type of pattern, based on proximity to the edge of a focal habitat. In this manner, an array of land-use change patterns can be generated, including pasture encroaching into forest from the forest edge, agriculture expanding from currently cropped areas, forest fragmentation, and many others. The resulting land-use maps can then be used as inputs to InVEST models, or other models for biodiversity or ecosystem services that are responsive to land use change.”
~ Stacie
