Finally, future land use can be visualized by allocating new population to the most preferred places for new urban use based on the LUCIS results. Six steps are required to accomplish this. Remember, this is assuming a baseline policy scenario to demonstrate. The six steps, in order, are the following:
- Allocate cells to future urban use where LUCIS results indicate there is no conflict between collapsed preference values and urban preference dominates.
- If needed, allocate additional cells to future urban use where LUCIS results show urban collapsed preference values are in conflict (moderate, then major if necessary) with agriculture or conservation collapsed preference values, but where the normalized values for urban are highest.
- Create a “2050 remaining lands” mask to account for the cells allocated for future urban land use in steps 1 and 2.
- Allocate remaining cells to future agricultural use where LUCIS results show agriculture collapsed preference values are not in conflict and greater than conservation and urban collapsed preference values.
- Allocate remaining cells to future conservation use where LUCIS results show conservation collapsed preference values are not in conflict and greater than agriculture and urban collapsed preference values.
- Allocate all remaining cells to either agriculture or conservation where LUCIS results show collapsed preference values are in conflict (moderate and major), but the normalized preference values for agriculture and conservation, respectively, are greatest.