Raymundo Marcos Martinez

Major Professor

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) processes are result of the interaction of several socioeconomics, environmental and institutional factors. Those processes affect biodiversity, soil quality, water resources availability, and can even alter local, regional and global weather. Understanding those processes is essential to determine effective policies to promote urban and rural sustainable development.
During recent years several models have been developed to explain how driving forces interact at different scales and magnitudes to promote certain LULCC. Most of those models are focused on deforestation dynamics. But given the ecological and economical importance of agroforest ecosystems it is necessary the analysis of how current methodologies allow the identification and measurement of driving forces of LULCC in shade-grown or diversified crops. My research will be focused on analyzing and contrasting the performance of different LULCC models to identify the effectiveness of each approach and then try to generate a more efficient proposal.