An Empirical Examination of Social and Biophysical Drivers and Land Cover Change in the Vicinity of Publicly-Owned, Protected Lands

The purpose of this research is to examine the empirical relationship between social and biophysical drivers and land cover change in the vicinity of publicly-owned, protected lands. Two primary hypotheses drive this research. The first is that the public land boundaries will function as ecological switches. The second is that different modalities of land cover change -- development, deforestation, and reforestation -- operate differently within the human-mediated landscapes. Specifically, three models explore the role of distance from the boundaries of the public lands in conjunction with an array of other established proximate drivers of land cover change. These empirical models provide insight into the locally specific determinants of human-induced land cover change for the modalities of development, deforestation and reforestation. Each model presented does confirm the hypotheses of the ecological switching behavior of public land boundaries. The models demonstrate the complex and non-linear relationships between the social, economic, and biophysical variables and the specific modality of land cover change considered and the different insights gained through global and locally specific regression techniques.