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Urban Scaling as Validation for Predictions of Imperviousness From Population
Author(s) -
Brelsford Christa,
Coon Ethan T.,
Moran Edward,
AllenDumas Melissa
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2020gl089742
Subject(s) - impervious surface , urbanization , climate change , environmental science , population , land cover , futures contract , land use, land use change and forestry , land use , scaling , ecosystem , environmental resource management , ecology , mathematics , biology , demography , geometry , sociology , financial economics , economics
Strategies for creating quantitative projections for human systems, especially impervious surfaces, are necessary to consider the human drivers of climate and ecosystem change. There are models that generate predictions of how impervious surfaces may change in response to different potential futures, but few tools exist for validating those predictions. We seek to fill that gap. We demonstrate a statistically robust sublinear scaling relationship between population and urban imperviousness across a 15 year history. We show that Integrated Climate and Land‐Use Scenarios (ICLUS) urbanization projections are also consistent with theory. These results demonstrate a theory that can be used to validate other models' predictions of urban growth and land cover change, analogous to the ways in which allometric scaling laws in biology have been used to validate process‐based models of ecosystem composition under different climate scenarios.