Integrated high-resolution, continental-scale land change forecasting

Predicting future land change is crucial in anticipating societal and environmental impacts and informing responses at different scales. We designed an integrated, high-resolution, land-change model and forecasted Australia's land change for the years 2020, 2025 and 2030 for Cropland, Forest, Grassland, and Built-up landuses using cloud-based and high-performance computing. A spatially explicit set of drivers was fed into a random forest classifier to generate 30-m per-class suitability layers for the country, which were then used for allocating land-use. The model was validated against 2015 data, then land-use was projected until 2030. Accuracy at the national level was -94%. Forecasts showed increases in Grassland and Built-up areas and decreases in Forest and Cropland. Our modelling framework expands the current capabilities of large-scale land-change models and provides a first-of-its-kind multiclass land forecast for Australia that can inform land policy at multiple scales in Australia.