"Modeling and Projecting Urban and Exurban Growth and Its Impacts"
John Landis, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California at Berkeley

This workshop will demonstrate statewide procedures for modeling urban and exurban growth, for developing spatially-explicit urban growth scenarios, and for analyzing past and potential impacts of urban growth on the natural landscape. The workshop will demonstrate how commonly available polygon and raster datasets can be used to identify past patterns of urban and exurban development; how the same datasets can be used to develop and test spatially-explicit statistical models of urban growth; and how the results of these models can be used to develop future growth scenarios. The workshop will draw on recent work undertaken for the California Resources Agency as part of its Legacy Program. Participants will gain practical experience building and using urban growth models and procedures. Scenario-building datasets and software will be provided to workshop participants via CD for onsite use in laptop computers. Some knowledge of raster GIS and elementary statistics is assumed.