I am interested in the policy and economics of land use--particularly the causes and impacts of urban/suburban development (i.e. "sprawl") and the effectiveness of policies in mediating those impacts, including land conservation. I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial statistics, remote sensing, econometrics and land use simulation modeling as tools for addressing these questions, in addition to more qualitative methods.
On the causes side, I am interested in the behavior of land markets, in the nature of land speculation and in devising metrics for assessing supply and demand, such as the emerging method of land supply monitoring, which uses GIS, remote sensing and parcel databases to assess how much land in a greater metropolitan area is actually developable, and what land should be prioritized for conservation. On the impacts side, I am interested in developing methods of assessing how different types and intensities of development fragment habitat, affect water quality and alter the visual landscape.
I also study the nature of governmental and non-governmental intervention in land use, in terms of effectiveness, motivation and institutional behavior. When are regulatory approaches appropriate versus market based approaches? How do information dissemination mechanisms affect land markets? How can fiscal tools, such as favorable property tax treatment, be used to guide land markets? What social and economic factors explain why different localities take such different approaches to land use regulation? What factors explain why some local governments resist intrusion of state and federal authority into local land use regulation while others welcome it? When is higher-level intervention in land use beneficial? How does the level of control and coordination mediate land use outcomes? How do development pressures mediate levels of local land use regulation? How effective are land trusts and other non-governmental entities in altering regional land use patterns? What level and quality of data do government institutions need to make good land use decisions and formulate meaningful policies?
A further area of interest entails the valuation of non-market goods. I am interested in using statistical analysis of property transactions to determine how consumers value amenities, such as proximity to parks and open space, and disamenities, such such as proximity to hazard zones waste sites, and industrial facilities. I am additionally interested in developing new methodologies for valuing raw land.
The quantitative tools I use include Geographic Information Systems (GIS), econometric and statistical methods, simulation modeling, remote sensing image processing and spatial statistics. I am interested in developing new spatially explicit quantitative methods for analyzing land use. In particular, I'm interested in geostatistically based methods for quantifying and characterizing landscape (human and ecological) complexity and scale dependency. A new area in remote sensing that interests me greatly is object-oriented classification, in which classifies contiguous groups of pixels based not just on their spectral reflectance values, but also on their spatial arrangement and relationships. As for qualitative methods, I also work with mail surveys and interview techniques to elucidate some of the social, cultural and perceptual factors underlying land use processes. Many of my current projects involve the use of land use change simulation and policy modeling. These approaches enable the prediction of future land use patterns, based on past trends. They also allow us to model outcomes under hypothetical policy scenarios. For instance, an urban growth model allows us to predict the extent of new development in ten years under current policies. We could then alter those policies (for instance, build a hypothetical new highway, or enact a hypothetical urban growth boundary) and see how land use outcomes change. For more on this, see my research page.