The Driving Forces Of Land Change In The Northern Piedmont Of The United States

Authors

Roger F. Auch, U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources and Observation Science CenterFollow
Darrell E. Napton, South Dakota State UniversityFollow
Steven Kambly, U.S. Geological Survey’s Eastern Geographic Science CenterFollow
Thomas R. Moreland Jr., U.S. Geological Survey’s Eastern Geographic Science CenterFollow
Kristi L. Sayler, U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources and Observation Science CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

1-2012

Citation

The Geographical Review 102 (1): 53-75, January 2012.

Abstract

Driving forces facilitate or inhibit land-use / land-cover change. Human driving forces include political, economic, cultural, and social attributes that often change across time and space. Remotely sensed imagery provides regional land-change data for the Northern Piedmont, an ecoregion of the United States that continued to urbanize after 1970 through conversion of agricultural and forest land covers to developed uses. Eight major driving forces facilitated most of the land conversion; other drivers inhibited or slowed change. A synergistic web of drivers may be more important in understanding land change than individual drivers by themselves.