@article{tonini_shoemaker_petrasova_harmon_petras_cobb_mitasova_meentemeyer_2017, title={Tangible geospatial modeling for collaborative solutions to invasive species management}, volume={92}, ISSN={["1873-6726"]}, url={http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85014320386&partnerID=MN8TOARS}, DOI={10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.02.020}, abstractNote={Managing landscape-scale environmental problems, such as biological invasions, can be facilitated by integrating realistic geospatial models with user-friendly interfaces that stakeholders can use to make critical management decisions. However, gaps between scientific theory and application have typically limited opportunities for model-based knowledge to reach the stakeholders responsible for problem-solving. To address this challenge, we introduce Tangible Landscape, an open-source participatory modeling tool providing an interactive, shared arena for consensus-building and development of collaborative solutions for landscape-scale problems. Using Tangible Landscape, stakeholders gather around a geographically realistic 3D visualization and explore management scenarios with instant feedback; users direct model simulations with intuitive tangible gestures and compare alternative strategies with an output dashboard. We applied Tangible Landscape to the complex problem of managing the emerging infectious disease, sudden oak death, in California and explored its potential to generate co-learning and collaborative management strategies among actors representing stakeholders with competing management aims. Participatory modeling frameworks are needed to bridge research and management.With Tangible Landscape, users guided complex models using tangible gestures.Near real-time 3D visualizations and feedbacks supported collective decision making.Informed individuals engaged in trade-offs that facilitated solution building.}, journal={ENVIRONMENTAL MODELLING & SOFTWARE}, author={Tonini, Francesco and Shoemaker, Douglas and Petrasova, Anna and Harmon, Brendan and Petras, Vaclav and Cobb, Richard C. and Mitasova, Helena and Meentemeyer, Ross K.}, year={2017}, month={Jun}, pages={176–188} }
 @article{dorning_smith_shoemaker_meentemeyer_2015, title={Changing decisions in a changing landscape: How might forest owners In an urbanizing region respond to emerging bioenergy markets?}, volume={49}, ISSN={["1873-5754"]}, DOI={10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.06.020}, abstractNote={The global bioenergy market has considerable impacts on local land use patterns, including landscapes in the Southeastern United States where increased demand for bioenergy feedstocks in the form of woody biomass is likely to affect the management and availability of forest resources. Despite extensive research investigating the productivity and impacts of different bioenergy feedstocks, relatively few studies have assessed the preferences of private landowners, who control the majority of forests in the eastern U.S., to harvest biomass for the bioenergy market. To better understand contingent behaviors given emerging biomass markets, we administered a stated preference experiment to private forest owners in the rapidly urbanizing Charlotte Metropolitan region. Respondents indicated their preferences for harvesting woody biomass under a set of hypothetical market-based scenarios with varying forest management plans and levels of economic return. Our analytical framework also incorporated data from a previously-administered revealed preference survey and spatially-explicit remote sensing data, enabling us to analyze how individuals’ ownership characteristics, their emotional connection the forests they manage, and the spatial patterns of nearby land uses, influence willingness to grow bioenergy feedstocks. We found conditional support for feedstock production, even among woodland owners with no history of active management. Landowners preferred higher economic returns for each management plan. However low-intensity harvest options were always preferred to more intensive management alternatives regardless of economic return, suggesting that these landowners may be more strongly motivated by aesthetic or quality-of-life concerns than feedstock revenues. Our analysis indicated preferences were dependent upon individual and environmental characteristics, with younger, more rural landowners significantly more interested in growing feedstocks relative to their older and more urban counterparts. While this study focuses on one small sample of urban forest owners, our results do suggest that policy makers and resource managers can better inform stand-level decision-making by understanding how feedstock production preferences vary across populations.}, journal={LAND USE POLICY}, author={Dorning, Monica A. and Smith, Jordan W. and Shoemaker, Douglas A. and Meentemeyer, Ross K.}, year={2015}, month={Dec}, pages={1–10} }
 @article{dorning_koch_shoemaker_meentemeyer_2015, title={Simulating urbanization scenarios reveals tradeoffs between conservation planning strategies}, volume={136}, ISSN={["1872-6062"]}, DOI={10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.11.011}, abstractNote={Land that is of great value for conservation can also be highly suitable for human use, resulting in competition between urban development and the protection of natural resources. To assess the effectiveness of proposed regional land conservation strategies in the context of rapid urbanization, we measured the impacts of simulated development patterns on two distinct conservation goals: protecting priority natural resources and limiting landscape fragmentation. Using a stochastic, patch-based land change model (FUTURES) we projected urbanization in the North Carolina Piedmont according to status quo trends and several conservation-planning strategies, including constraints on the spatial distribution of development, encouraging infill, and increasing development density. This approach allows simulation of population-driven land consumption without excluding the possibility of development, even in areas of high conservation value. We found that if current trends continue, new development will consume 11% of priority resource lands, 21% of forested land, and 14% of farmlands regionally by 2032. We also found that no single conservation strategy was optimal for achieving both conservation goals. For example, strategies that excluded development from priority areas caused increased fragmentation of forests and farmlands, while infill strategies increased loss of priority resources proximal to urban areas. Exploration of these land change scenarios not only confirmed that a failure to act is likely to result in irreconcilable losses to a conservation network, but that all conservation plans are not equivalent in effect, highlighting the importance of analyzing tradeoffs between alternative conservation planning approaches.}, journal={LANDSCAPE AND URBAN PLANNING}, author={Dorning, Monica A. and Koch, Jennifer and Shoemaker, Douglas A. and Meentemeyer, Ross K.}, year={2015}, month={Apr}, pages={28–39} }
 @article{bendor_shoemaker_thill_dorning_meentemeyer_2014, title={A mixed-methods analysis of social-ecological feedbacks between urbanization and forest persistence}, volume={19}, ISSN={["1708-3087"]}, DOI={10.5751/es-06508-190303}, abstractNote={We examined how social-ecological factors in the land-change decision-making process influenced neighboring decisions and trajectories of alternative landscape ecologies. We decomposed individual landowner decisions to conserve or develop forests in the rapidly growing Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. region, exposing and quantifying the effects of forest quality, and social and cultural dynamics. We tested the hypothesis that the intrinsic value of forest resources, e.g., cultural attachment to land, influence woodland owners’ propensity to sell. Data were collected from a sample of urban, nonindustrial private forest (U-NIPF) owners using an individualized survey design that spatially matched land-owner responses to the ecological and timber values of their forest stands. Cluster analysis (n = 126) revealed four woodland owner typologies with widely ranging views on the ecosystem, cultural, and historical values of their forests. Classification tree analysis revealed woodland owners’ willingness to sell was characterized by nonlinear, interactive factors, including sense of place values regarding the retention of native vegetation, the size of forest holdings, their connectedness to nature, ‘pressure’ from surrounding development, and behavioral patterns, such as how often landowners visit their land. Several ecological values and economic factors were not found to figure in the decision to retain forests. Our study design is unique in that we address metropolitan forest persistence across urban-rural and population gradients using a unique individualized survey design that richly contextualizes survey responses. Understanding the interplay between policies and landowner behavior can also help resource managers to better manage and promote forest persistence. Given the region’s paucity of policy tools to manage the type and amount of development, the mosaic of land cover the region currently enjoys is far from stable.}, number={3}, journal={ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY}, author={BenDor, Todd and Shoemaker, Douglas A. and Thill, Jean-Claude and Dorning, Monica A. and Meentemeyer, Ross K.}, year={2014} }
 @article{meentemeyer_tang_dorning_vogler_cunniffe_shoemaker_2013, title={FUTURES: Multilevel Simulations of Emerging Urban-Rural Landscape Structure Using a Stochastic Patch-Growing Algorithm}, volume={103}, ISSN={["1467-8306"]}, DOI={10.1080/00045608.2012.707591}, abstractNote={We present a multilevel modeling framework for simulating the emergence of landscape spatial structure in urbanizing regions using a combination of field-based and object-based representations of land change. The FUTure Urban-Regional Environment Simulation (FUTURES) produces regional projections of landscape patterns using coupled submodels that integrate nonstationary drivers of land change: per capita demand, site suitability, and the spatial structure of conversion events. Patches of land change events are simulated as discrete spatial objects using a stochastic region-growing algorithm that aggregates cell-level transitions based on empirical estimation of parameters that control the size, shape, and dispersion of patch growth. At each time step, newly constructed patches reciprocally influence further growth, which agglomerates over time to produce patterns of urban form and landscape fragmentation. Multilevel structure in each submodel allows drivers of land change to vary in space (e.g., by jurisd...}, number={4}, journal={ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS}, author={Meentemeyer, Ross K. and Tang, Wenwu and Dorning, Monica A. and Vogler, John B. and Cunniffe, Nik J. and Shoemaker, Douglas A.}, year={2013}, month={Jul}, pages={785–807} }