MOLUSCE — Land cover changes analysis in QGIS

A researcher who analyses changes in landscape through time often deals with questions like:

What are the changes and where did they happen?
Which factors can explain the changes and strong is their explanatory power?
What changes are expected in future and where?

The answer for the first question can be obtained by visual estimation, but to answer other questions one will need to set hypothises, verify them, derive conclusions and see how they meet the reality.

MOLUSCE is a free QGIS plugin to automate the process of answering such questions. This plugin is installed in the same way as any other module – through the official repository within QGIS.

Briefly, the workflow consists of the following steps:

Obtain landcover map for few time slices and a set of potential explanatory variables;
Calculate probabilities of transitions from class to class;
Build a model using ANN, logistic regression, Weights of evidence or Multi-criteria evaluation to describe transitions based on factor variables;
Use this model for forecasting;
Validate the result with real data.

MOLUSCE is available in standard QGIS Plugins repository.

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