Remove lands whose use will not change
- Regardless of the degree of preference resulting from the application of the LUCIS process, in reality there are some areas whose current uses are unlikely to change. These include existing urban lands, lands having a protected conservation status, and areas of open water. Conflict will not occur on these lands, because they are already permanently designated; so these areas must be removed from consideration prior to identifying potential conflict.
Normalize and collapse preference results
- Normalizing the values before comparing preferences is considered to be the best practice.
- To simplify comparison among the normalized results, the normalized preference values are collapsed into three classes that correspond to high, medium, and low preferences. The strength of mapping “collapsed preference” is that the preference values may be easily combined to show different relationships among the three categories.
Conceptualized conflict
- Since LUCIS is based on three land-use categories, the characterization of conflict among these three can be conceived of as a cube containing collapsed preference values, with each of the three preference rasters represented on one axis of the cube to form a three-dimensional conflict space diagram. The resulting cube is composed of 27 (33) smaller cubes, each representing one of the unique combinations of high (3), medium (2) and low (1) preference for agriculture, conservation, and urban land use (figure below).
Conflict mapping
- To determine conflict areas, the three normalized and collapsed land-use preference rasters are combined and reclassified into areas of conflict and areas of no conflict. Conflict occurs any time (1) three cells sharing the same spatial location have equal collapsed preference values (major conflict), or (2) two cells have equal collapsed preference values, and the third cell has a lower collapsed preference (moderate conflict).
- Table below shows that of the 27 possible conflict space combinations, 12 produce conflict and 15 do not. Of the 15 combinations that do not produce conflict, five have a higher preference for agriculture, five for conservation, and five for urban land uses.