Modeling Land Use Change and Population RelocationDynamics in Response to Different Sea Level Rise Scenarios: aCase Study in Bay County, Florida

Growing rates of sea level rise (SLR) are expected to result in permanent inundation, episodic flooding and other hazards in coastal regions, presenting an increasing threat and high pressure to coastal ecosystems. This study presents a comprehensive methodology, a multinomial linear based cellular automata (CA) model framework, to investigate the effects of SLR on residential land use change and population dynamics in coastal regions. A questionnaire survey has been conducted on coastal residents to examine their attitudes toward future adaptation strategies (e.g., preference to residential relocation). The population is forecasted using a logit model, followed by identification of permanently inundated lands from SLR via ArcGIS spatial analysis. To capture the mobility and location choice, the CA model simulates the spatial suitability of land use change based on both physical land use suitability and impacts of neighboring lands, coupled with employing a binary logit model to describe the households’ mobility behaviors. At a cell level (50m × 50m), land use data in Years 1995 and 2010 from Bay County, Florida are used for both model calibration and validation. The model can predict 83.47% of actual residential land use change for Year 2010. Under three SLR scenarios (low, medium and high), the future land development adaptation in Years 2030 and 2080 are produced by the calibrated model. A comparison of model results with and without SLR consideration indicates that the proposed model can efficiently produce future land use changes and reflect the corresponding population dynamics. The proposed methodology could articulate a range of adaptation and mitigation possibilities for managing coastal regions in response to future SLR, thereby offering possible responses which are applicable to a variety of regional, national and international contexts, and provide a basis from which further research, assessments and action can emanate.