Optimal Scales of Neighbourhood Effects on Landuse Change: An Analysis Procedure Applied in an Alpine Mountainous Region

Neighbourhood effects on land use change are very common. Therefore, they are often
included in spatially explicit models of land use change and other spatial analyses. Neighbourhood
indices, however, depend strongly on the spatial extent set for calculating them. So far, most of the
existing land-use change analyses or models using neighbourhood indices assumed some predefined
neighbourhood extents without proving whether the selected extents are optimal for the analysis of the
corresponding land use dynamics. This paper presents a methodological procedure to identify (i) the
optimal neighbourhood extent and (ii) the range of scale-dependency in neighbourhood effects of
different land use types and different types of land conversions. We applied this procedure in the canton
Valais of Switzerland, an inner Alpine mountainous region. The findings clearly show the differences in
optimal neighbourhood extent and the scale-dependency among conversion types. The procedure
introduced in this contribution can help to optimize the neighbourhood variables in spatially explicit landuse
change models toward improving model robustness and accuracy